The Scottish media has really had to scrape the barrel to give a negative spin to some NHS stats today. The Herald, Daily Mail, Daily Record and Scotsman all feature a story concerning an increase in ambulance waiting times, noting that the number of callouts taking more than ten minutes has doubled in four years.
What they’re a lot more reluctant to reveal is that the reason for that is a deliberate policy change which has meant ambulances have been saving more people’s lives.
Buried at the end of the articles is a quote from the Scottish Ambulance Service noting that halfway through that four-year period it implemented a new protocol prioritising patients in the most urgent need.
People with cardiac arrest, for example, for whose survival every second counts, are now attended faster than people being taken to hospital to have an ingrown toenail treated, with the result that dozens of additional lives were saved last year while almost everyone (96%) still got an ambulance within 20 minutes, even for trivial cases where the service is in effect being deployed as a glorified taxi.
So in short, then: a policy designed to save lives has succeeded in its aims, Scottish Labour are furious about it (because there’s nothing they love more than being able to parade a poor bereaved widow at First Minister’s Questions), and the Scottish press dutifully whips their press release up into a scandal to try to terrify their elderly readers.
Welcome to Monday-morning business as usual, folks.
