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Letters to the press, 07/10/21: “Hearing Humza Yousaf say that things are going to get worse before they get better is frightening”

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Death of every child in Scotland reviewed to reduce mortality rate – STV news

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The mortality rate for under-18s in Scotland is higher than any other country in western Europe.

The death of every child in Scotland is to be reviewed in future in an attempt to reduce the avoidable deaths of young people, the Scottish Government has announced.

Information is now being collected about the death of anyone aged 18 or younger, or up to 26 if they had recently been receiving care.

The mortality rate for under-18s in Scotland is higher than any other country in western Europe, with approximately 300 children and young people dying every year.

A quarter of those deaths are deemed preventable, and the Scottish Government hopes that gathering data about the causes could help reduce the number of avoidable deaths.

Public health minister Maree Todd said: “The death of any child or young person is a tragedy.

“Our ambition is for Scotland to be the best place to grow up, where every child can reach their full potential.

“We have put in place this national system so we can learn and prevent avoidable deaths or harm in the future and I welcome that it is now being rolled out.”

The death data be collected by government bodies Healthcare Improvement Scotland and the Care Inspectorate and will be studied by representatives from the health and social care sector, Police Scotland, the Procurator Fiscal and charities, with the aim of improving services or recommending changes to the law.

Death of every child in Scotland reviewed to reduce mortality rate

‘The SNP has leadership pygmies to choose from post-Sturgeon’ – STV news

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Nicola Sturgeon is a “giant among pygmies” in the SNP when it comes to leadership credentials, according to a senior Conservative MP.

Oliver Dowden, the Conservative Party’s co-chairman, took aim at the First Minister as he outlined his hopes for winning seats in Scotland once Sturgeon is no longer SNP leader.

Speaking at the party’s conference in Manchester on Sunday, Dowden said: “I do think there’s a real opportunity for us in Scotland for a couple of reasons.

“First of all, Nicola Sturgeon is not going to be there forever and after Nicola Sturgeon the rest of them – I’m not saying in any way Nicola Sturgeon is a wonderful person, but compared to her comrades as it were, she’s a giant among pygmies, and so I think as she goes they will be very weakened.

“And secondly, I think we have a real opportunity to focus on the actual delivery of the nationalists in Scotland, which has been completely lamentable – whether it’s education, whether it’s health, they are falling massively behind the rest of England.

“Nicola Sturgeon constantly tries to distract from this by talking endlessly about independence.

“We need to bring that focus back on their delivery in Scotland, which is lamentable.”

At Westminster, the SNP currently has 45 MPs compared to six Tory MPs, four Liberal Democrats, two Alba Party, one Labour and one independent from the Scottish seats.

‘The SNP has leadership pygmies to choose from post-Sturgeon’

NHS Highland pays out millions of pounds to bullied members of staff – STV news

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NHS Highland has paid out millions of pounds to current and former staff who said they were victims of workplace bullying.

The health board, which covers the Highlands and Argyll and Bute, has so far made 150 financial payments – totalling more than £2m – as part of a “healing process”.

It expects to pay a total of £3.4m once all remaining cases have been settled.

But NHS Highland says that is a lower figure than the anticipated £4.2m it had earlier set aside, adding that funding provided by the Scottish Government “should be sufficient” to cover the settlements.

The health board was heavily criticised after an investigation found hundreds of staff across the region may have endured inappropriate behaviour.

Many said they had been victims of bullying within the service, while many quit their jobs or transferred elsewhere within the NHS.

The extent of the bullying was exposed by whistleblowers in 2018.

QC John Sturrock led an independent inquiry into the allegations after several hundred staff lodged complaints.

NHS Highland pays out millions of pounds to bullied members of staff

For economic news, click here: https://www.scotlandmatters.co.uk/economy-matters/

Social care sector ‘on its knees’ amid recruitment crisis – STV news

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Social care sector ‘on its knees’ amid recruitment crisis

The social care sector in Scotland is “on its knees”, it has been claimed, amid a warning that a lack of new recruits could force services to grind to a halt.

Lynn Bell, CEO of LOVE Group, a care provider based in Hamilton, highlighted the recruitment crisis in the sector in an interview with STV News.

And she explained that her organisation has had to consider prioritising certain care packages as a contingency measure in place of not delivering care.

“I think the social care sector is actually on its knees in terms of recruitment,” Bell said.

“What we are trying to do is attract people into a sector that’s broken.

“We could quite literally hire 500 people tomorrow and we can’t attract people into the jobs.

“So, it’s been quite disastrous and without exaggeration, the care sector itself is going to grind to a halt and people’s care might stop.”

She added: “Care is going to stop. People are going to stop receiving their care at home, it is an absolute fact.

“And as a care company, we have already started to look at prioritising certain care packages as a contingency to not delivering care.”

Bell indicated that the sector is experiencing challenges with recruitment across the board.

“It will quite literally stop and that doesn’t just apply to our organisation, that applies to every organisation,” she said.

“We go into provider meetings with local authorities, local authorities are providing care to families and everybody has the same message.

“Everybody is struggling, nobody can recruit and we just can’t get the bodies through the door.

“So, it will quite literally stop and we’re not far away.”

Donald Macaskill, chief executive of Scottish Care, urged national and local government to invest in care.

Doctors are exhausted, says BMA Scotland chief – BBC news

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Scotland’s doctors are “exhausted” and many are cutting working hours or leaving the health service altogether, according to a senior doctors’ leader.

BMA Scotland chairman Dr Lewis Morrison told BBC Scotland that doctors were “washed out physically and mentally” after 18 months of the Covid pandemic.

He said action was needed to stop doctors leaving the profession and to boost recruitment of new medics.

The Scottish government said it was working to manage the pressures.

Speaking ahead of the BMA’s annual representative meeting, Dr Morrison said the “workforce crisis” had its roots in the number of senior doctor vacancies before the pandemic.

But he said that the NHS “being run at 110% capacity” during Covid had deepened the crisis.

The pressures across the NHS had been “immense” in the past few weeks, he said.

Dr Morrison said doctors traditionally had low levels of sickness but it was starting to rise.

“I think the cumulative effect of the pandemic is now starting to show,” he said.

“The main other thing is to look after people, to give people the space to have rest and recuperation as best they can, to not pressurise people to do more and more.

“The message needs to go to the public to still be patient with the NHS because it cannot meet the needs of everybody right now.”

For more health news, click here: https://www.scotlandmatters.co.uk/health-matters/

Education is too ‘political’ in Scotland, OECD report author warns – The Scotsman

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Speaking at the Scottish Parliament’s education committee on Wednesday, the report’s co-author Dr Beatriz Pont warned Scotland needed to “drop the politics” and focus on policy to move forward.

The authors of the report, published in June, also told MSPs the Scottish National Standardised Assessments (SNSA) were “not the most appropriate system monitoring mechanism” for measuring the success of Curriculum for Excellence (CfE)

The tests, introduced in 2017, led to pupils experiencing high-stakes tests in primary one, four, seven and in S3 in secondary school. They are opposed by all of Scotland’s teaching unions, as well as by parents groups.

The report, Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence Into the Future, recommended scrapping the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) and reforming Education Scotland.

The exams body is to be broken up and replaced, with pupils, parents and teachers to be consulted on changes, while responsibility for school inspections will be split off to a new independent system.

Dr Pont said: “We’re providing recommendations to have to consolidate the structures to make your CfE less political and more policy oriented.

For more education fails, click here: https://www.scotlandmatters.co.uk/education-matters/

Leaked internal report reveals SNP ‘overwhelmed’ by member complaints – GuidoFox

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A bombshell internal report written by SNP Deputy Leader Keith Brown has revealed the dire state of the party’s internal affairs: not only does the report suggest creating a new financial scrutiny committee to “restore confidence” in the SNP’s financial governance, it also shows that party has been “overwhelmed” by the volume of member complaints over harassment and impropriety since 2014. Presumably keeping their new ‘complaints adviser’ busy, then…

The report goes into great detail to explain how “recent controversies concerning the party’s finances” (in other words, how a £600,000 referendum war chest seemingly vanished into thin air) have “inevitably raise[d] questions about the SNP’s financial governance”, and recommends creating a more formal financial governance structure that “encourages good financial practices, [and] has the potential to pick up any irregularities”. Which is useful, because the party’s auditors have already washed their hands of that responsibility.

It also says that the party’s “current complaints-handling procedures have themselves resulted in a real dissatisfaction [and] lack of trust” amongst the membership, and that the Governance Review Group often failed to act on incidences of abuse despite repeated warnings from within the party. Considering 1 in 5 SNP MPs has either recently quit, or been sacked, investigated or suspended, perhaps the Governance Review Group has just had its hands full…

Leaked Internal Report Reveals SNP “Overwhelmed” by Member Complaints

Scotnitive dissonance: Scotland’s other pandemic – Think Scotland

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IN To A Louse, Robert Burns laments “O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us, To see oursels as ithers see us!”, which, roughly translated, means that it is a shame that we can’t see ourselves as other people do, faults and all.

Given that, thankfully, in the last 334 years both farming technology and poetry have come a long way, this presents the opportunity for Scotland to update this charming little maxim because it’s needed now more than ever before.

In fact, rather than seeing ourselves as other people do, we should settle for the slightly less lofty goal of seeing ourselves as we actually are because there is a huge gap in our arrogant perception of ourselves versus the uncomfortable, destructive, and harmful reality of modern Scotland.

Scotland is in the grip of a condition I’ve come to call, Scotnitive Dissonance… and it’s hurting us.

You will have heard the claim before, surely? It first came to my attention during the debates, speaking engagements, and other such events I took part in during the 2014 independence referendum. Representing, it will come as no surprise, the NO side, I often heard about how much more “progressive” Scotland is compared with the rest of the United Kingdom and that, my interlocutors would insist, was grounds for Scotland to go it alone.

Those claims have, from what I can tell, gotten louder since 2014. Their 2021 updated versions usually comes accompanied by pointing to the electoral success of the SNP, an essay on whose ‘talk’ versus ‘act’ difference could also be another 1000 words or so, and their new ‘not a coalition’ partners in the Scottish Greens. Proponents of the ‘Scotland’s just more progressive’ line also regularly point out that Scotland overwhelmingly voted to stay in the European Union which, I hasten to point out, is a crass over-simplification given the strength of the left-wing, Tony Benn school, of Euroscepticism. It’s a simple failure of reasoning that takes no notice of things in practice.

Scotnitive dissonance: Scotland’s other pandemic

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