Under SNP, cancer treatment delays have hit truly appalling levels – Alex Cole-Hamilton MSP

It’s said that in ancient China, you paid your doctor every day you were well and stopped paying him when you fell sick.

Early detection and treatment of cancer is vital (Picture: Rui Vieira/PA)

It was his job to keep you well, to promote your well-being and physical health. When he fell short of that goal, you withheld payment. I’ve always found that an elegant example of what we should be aspiring to in Scottish health: health promotion, the prevention of acute illness, detecting serious issues early and getting the right intervention to patients fast.

In SNP Scotland, that’s not happening right now, not by a longshot.

There are examples of unacceptable waiting times and delays to treatment in every corner of our health service, but last week new figures revealed that the situation is especially acute in cancer care.

More than a third of all cancers are now only identified when a patient presents at an Accident and Emergency department in one our nation’s hospitals. That is a desperately worrying reality. It means that only when the impact of a tumour gets so bad it forces someone to dial 999 is their cancer revealed to them.

The pandemic has certainly worsened the problem. Many people avoided primary care settings when cancer symptoms first appeared or missed regular screening appointments, because they feared catching the virus. But there were already serious issues before Covid struck, and delayed diagnosis is just part of the problem.

In Scotland, the government has set a ​62-day target between diagnosis and commencement of cancer treatment. They aren’t hitting that target anywhere.

In fact, there isn’t a health board in the country that gets anywhere near meeting that target for all of their cancer patients. All told, nearly a quarter of people diagnosed with cancer don’t start their treatment within the time window proscribed by the government. Given everything we know about the importance of catching and treating these ​conditions early, that's appalling.

It isn’t the fault of our staff. I am constantly in awe of the Herculean efforts of doctors, nurses and all of the others that our health service depends upon who have been weaving gold out of straw and going the extra mile, often to the point of exhaustion.

This is instead about a range of pressures, like delayed discharge of patients from hospital, staff absence and shortages, and surgery ward backlogs. And do you know what? It’s only getting worse.

I struggle to think of an area of the health service where every second counts more than in cancer care and, right now, we are nowhere.

The health of our nation is the most important policy area entrusted to the Scottish Government, but on this vital metric the SNP are fresh out of ideas. They and their Green party partners even voted against a range of solutions recently offered by the Scottish Liberal Democrats, like a burnout prevention strategy to aid staff retention and an NHS staff assembly to allow everyone who works in the NHS the chance to suggest ways to make it work better.

We need SNP ministers to be more ambitious here. They shouldn’t just be striving to meet the 62-day target, they should be striving to smash it everywhere and for everyone. Lives literally depend on such ambition.

Alex Cole-Hamilton is Scottish Liberal Democrat MSP for Edinburgh Western

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