The SNP is silencing NHS staff

4 August 2017

The SNP has cancelled an annual survey of NHS staff which highlighted the pressure they are under.

The NHS Scotland staff survey is normally published in December, but so far no survey has been published for 2016.

Previous staff surveys have highlighted the pressure NHS staff are under due to the SNP government's mismanagement of our health service.

The last staff survey to be published, in December 2015, revealed that only a third of NHS staff believed there were enough of them to do their jobs properly.

We are seeing more and more examples of NHS staff saying they are struggling to cope – 9 out of 10 nurses say their workload has got worse in the last year.

Meanwhile, the chair of the British Medical Association in Scotland has warned that our NHS workforce is ‘stretched pretty much to breaking point’.

In an interview on the BBC Sunday Politics Scotland programme, Dr Peter Bennie said doctors are ‘fed up’ with the SNP’s spin. 

Earlier this week, Labour revealed that unfilled posts in nursing and midwifery are rocketing in our NHS – that means more pressure on our existing NHS staff.  LINK

The people who work in our health service are the beating heart of our NHS. The SNP government should be listening to what they have to say, not cancelling an annual survey to avoid bad headlines.

Labour’s workforce commission will deliver a solution to the SNP’s NHS staffing crisis. It will look at how we can attract more people towards training for nursing and midwifery jobs and consider how to support more student nurses financially. It will also consider how to scrap the 1% pay cap for NHS staff.

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