HEALTH SCANDAL: Thousands had operations cancelled due to bed, staff or equipment shortage

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Almost 8,000 patients had their hospital operations cancelled in 2016

New figures show that in December, 644 (2.4 per cent) of operations were cancelled by health boards for "capacity or nonclinical" reasons.

These include include the unavailability of beds, staff and equipment as well as employee illness, dirty equipment and theatre sessions over-running.

The December figure takes the 2016 total to 7,740, an average of 21 per day.

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Last month in the NHS Highland area alone a fifth of planned operations (19 per cent) were cancelled.

Around half of those were due to capacity issues within its hospitals.

Opposition politicians said the official statistics were further evidence of SNP "mismanagement".

Scottish Tory shadow health spokesman Donald Cameron said: "There will always be occasions when the patient wants to cancel the procedure, but this is clearly far too high a statistic.

This is clearly far too high a statistic

Donald Cameron, Scottish Tory shadow health spokesman

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"The SNP has been in sole charge of health for a decade now and this falls squarely at its door."

Scottish Labour's Anas Sarwar added: "Every single day NHS staff tell us that they are under pressure and under-resourced.

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Many was cancelled due to 'capacity or nonclinical' reasons such as beds and staff shortage

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A fifth of planned operations in the NHS Highland area were cancelled last month

"Now we see that close to 8,000 planned operations were cancelled last year because hospitals did not have the capacity to cope.

"A decade of SNP mismanagement of our NHS means that patients are being let down because hospitals are not getting the support they need."

It follows a damning report by Audit Scotland which said in October that the NHS was struggling to cope with increasing demand and needed to make unprecedented savings.

Bed-blocking Experts also found that the Scottish Government's long-standing strategy for making the NHS sustainable, which involves treating patients in the community rather than hospital, has not been delivered.

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And last month it emerged almost 700 patients died over a 19-month period while waiting to be discharged from hospitals.

This was despite a promise from Health Secretary Shona Robison that she would "eradicate" the problem of bed-blocking.

Separate figures published yesterday (TUES) also showed accident and emergency departments again missed a key waiting times target.

Of 130,848 people attended who casualty last month, 92.6 per cent were seen and either admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours.

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Opposition politicians branded the statistics as further evidence of SNP 'mismanagement'

The figure is below the Scottish Government target for 95 per cent of cases to be dealt with in that time.

Performance was also down on the previous month (93.6 per cent) and lower than that recorded in December 2015 (94.9 per cent).

A total of eight health boards missed the target, with the poorest performance in NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, where 88.8 per cent were seen within the set time.Over the month, 891 (0.7 per cent) patients spent more than eight hours in A&E while 144 waited more than 12 hours.

Express.co.uk has contacted the Scottish Governement for comment.

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