Russell Findlay today criticised John Swinney for failing to deliver for patients as he highlighted that GP appointments hit the worst level on record this year.
At First Minister’s Questions, the Scottish Conservative leader cited Public Health Scotland data showing that, in the first three months of 2025, the number of GP appointments was the lowest on record.
He also raised official statistics that show over the past year there were 500,000 fewer GP appointments than in the year before John Swinney became First Minister.
BMA Scotland says the SNP’s latest pledge to increase the number of appointments by 100,000 per year is equivalent to just one extra day’s worth. It is an increase in capacity of less than one per cent.
Even then, the Royal College of General Practitioners Scotland say they “simply don’t have the workforce capacity” to deliver 100,000 extra appointments.
Russell Findlay also criticised the SNP’s previous NHS recovery plan and highlighted comments from Nicola Sturgeon that it was “awful”.
Her messages were revealed after journalists spent four years seeking the information from the Scottish government.
Scottish Conservative leader Russell Findlay said: “After 18 years of failure, John Swinney is now desperately trying to clear up the mess his government has made.
“The promises in the SNP’s Programme for Government are a pathetic con.
“The limit of John Swinney’s ambition is to undo a small amount of the damage he inflicted.
“The SNP never keep their word. They constantly make big pledges about the NHS but always fail patients.
“Nobody will believe that John Swinney will keep his latest promise when the SNP break them all the time.
“The SNP’s previous plans let patients down.
“My party condemned Humza Yousaf’s recovery plan as embarrassingly thin and flimsy. It turns out, the SNP agreed with us.
“The SNP spent four years trying to hide the truth about what Nicola Sturgeon really thought.
“Humza Yousaf’s plan caused waiting lists to rise, not fall. It was flimsy rubbish.
“But the SNP hid the truth from the public, so Humza Yousaf failed upwards.
“John Swinney helped Nicola Sturgeon’s awful health secretary become an awful First Minister.
“If the SNP had been honest and transparent, would Humza Yousaf have become First Minister?"
Notes
The first three months of 2025 were the worst start to a year for GP appointments on record. There were 4,310,259 direct GP encounters in the first three months of 2025, the lowest number on record for the first three months of a calendar year – including a 228,949 drop compared with the first three months of last year. (General Practice In-hours Activity Visualisation, 6 May 2025, link).