IN 2012, I was appointed to Labour’s Scottish shadow cabinet as the party’s spokesperson on health.

Being new to the role, I was upfront and frank with the interest groups, unions and health groups I met.

I advised them I was not going to pretend to know everything about the health and social care sector and that I wanted to listen, learn and think before developing new policy initiatives.

Hearing from NHS doctors, nurses, GPs, porters, support workers, cleaners, the Royal Colleges, Unison, Unite, GMB, RCN, BMA, support organisations, health charities and, most important of all, patients and patient groups was a tremendous experience and I learned so much. It was inspiring, emotional, often difficult and depressing.

In my day-to-day life I hear from my family about the NHS: my wife works in the NHS — not as a doctor or a surgeon, but as a clinical-support worker earning around the living wage for delivering the most important front line services — feeding, washing, dressing patients and helping doctors and nurses deliver care.

My daughter works in the NHS as an occupational therapist delivering healthcare to many vulnerable people with mental-health conditions.

They and their colleagues tell me about how they see staff going way beyond the call of duty to care for patients, to show empathy and compassion to the young and old, the new-born and the dying, those very ill and those getting better.

But staff are under huge pressure. They are at breaking point.

Nurses are walking up to 11 or 12 miles in a shift, do not take lunch breaks, are doing unpaid overtime and are being repeatedly asked to do bank shifts to cover the major gaps in staffing levels. Many are burnt out and leaving the sector early.

It is this reality over SNP rhetoric that frustrates me so much.

I watched Andrew Neil’s interview with Nicola Sturgeon and although it was good to see a master political interviewer put her through the mangle, I took no satisfaction from his summary of the crises and desperate needs of Scotland’s NHS — all overseen by Nicola Sturgeon.  

The record is not good.

This is the reality:

** The new Sick Kids hospital in Edinburgh is six years late, lies empty having never treated a single patient and is costing £1.4 million a month in charges and £16m extra to try and fix the drainage and ventilation problems

** The new Queen Elizabeth Hospital has been beset by problems since opening and is now at the centre of several investigations into the deaths of children treated there

** The children’s ward at St John’s Hospital has a staffing crisis that has lasted six years, with no sign of it being resolved

** 50 GP practices in Lothian alone have closed their lists to new patients 

** Scotland has the highest suicide rate in the UK

** Scotland has the highest level of drugs deaths in the EU

** The legal 18-week treatment time guaranteed for mental health has not been met at any time during Nicola Sturgeon’s time as First Minister

** The legal non-mental health treatment time guarantee of 12 weeks has been broken over 250,000 times with zero recourse for patients. This means the Scottish government has broken the law a quarter of a million times, but with no sanction.

** The cancer diagnosis target of six weeks has been breached 15,500 times

** And only one patient in five is getting the cancer treatment they need within a two-month period

** The social-care system is teetering on the brink with home care and care homes unable to recruit the staff needed

** NHS boards are having to be bailed out year on year just to balance the books — £90 million for NHS Lothian alone

** The mesh-implant crisis will see a record number of litigants taking action against NHS Scotland — over 600

** There is a £914m maintenance backlog 

** 420,000 bed days have been lost to delayed discharge — a 9 per cent increase in the last year alone

** Almost five million items of anti-depressants were prescribed in the last 18 months — one for every Scot

** There are major staff shortages in almost every NHS discipline.

This is the reality of what face staff every day they turn up for work. Staff and the patients deserve so much better.

The SNP never takes responsibility for anything — it is always someone else’s fault.

Sturgeon repeatedly and selectively points to what is happening in England, Wales, Northern Ireland or Timbuktu as a diversionary tactic to justify why the Scottish NHS is better than elsewhere, but it is of zero comfort to people in Livingston that their brother or sister in Birmingham or Belfast is waiting longer than they are at an A&E department or for mental-health treatment.

Sturgeon blames councils and other parties, hides behind the EU or any other fig leaf to deflect from her failings. It is time she accepted her responsibility: as a previous health secretary and current First Minister, she has been central to 12 years of failing policy.

In 2012, I said that we needed a fundamental review of the NHS to ensure that it was fit for the 21st century. Alex Neil, the then SNP cabinet secretary for health and wellbeing, dismissed that call, saying that it was a waste of time and money.

However, last week, the same Alex Neil now called for such a review to take place. If he had listened to my colleague Dr Richard Simpson and me in 2012, the review would be finished by now, we would be implementing its findings and Scotland’s NHS would be in much better shape.