Cabinet Secretary for NHS Recovery, Health and Social Care Michael Matheson has tendered his resignation to the First Minister.
Accepting his resignation, the First Minister thanked Mr Matheson for all he achieved during government, including securing £100 million of new annual funding for NHS Scotland to help reduce inpatient and day-case waiting lists, passing the Domestic Abuse Act to strengthen powers to tackle psychological abuse, passing the Transport Scotland Act to ensure Scotland’s transport system was more accessible for the future and introducing the Historical Offenses Bill to pardon gay men convinced under historical discriminatory laws.
MICHAEL MATHESON STATEMENT:
Odd timing, given he hasn’t seen the final report yet. And not a word of apology …
The Scottish Conservatives have been calling for the Health Secretary’s head for some time – and not only over his failure to fully explain the Ipad issue:
‘Waiting times in Scotland’s A&E departments continue to get worse under the SNP’s shameful mismanagement of our NHS.
‘The SNP have not met their target waiting time since July 2020, yet still Michael Matheson refuses to tackle this growing problem – he needs to go.’
“Patients continue to face long and dangerous waits as staff continue to be stretched to their limit. Ambulance queues, poor patient flow throughout our hospitals, exit block – where patients are stuck in the system in a ‘traffic jam’ – these remain prevalent across Emergency Departments in Scotland.
“We congratulate the First Minister for Scotland, Humza Yousaf MSP, on his appointment to his new role, and we welcome Michael Matheson MSP (above) to the role of Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care.
“We hope to continue and increase our engagement with the Scottish Government to improve patient care and staff conditions in Emergency Medicine and the wider health service.
“We urge the new Cabinet Secretary to build on the constructive engagement of his predecessor and increase focus on investing in adequate and sufficient social care to discharge patients in a timely way to free up beds.
£Alongside this, we ask him to prioritise expanding acute bed capacity across Scotland and retaining existing staff. These are the short-term priorities for Emergency Care. It would be wrong to take measures to manage demand and reduce attendances on the front door – such measures do nothing to tackle the root causes of long-term problems.
“In the long-term, we urge the new Cabinet Secretary to look at workforce planning and sustained and continued funding and investment in health and social care to ensure we do not reach the troughs of performance and patient care that we saw in 2022.
“We must reduce and eliminate dangerous and unacceptable delays to patient care that we know are associated with patient harm and patient deaths. We would welcome an opportunity to meet with the new Cabinet Secretary to discuss our Five Priorities for UK Governments for #ResuscitatingEmergencyCare.”
