Nicola Sturgeon admitted hospital waiting times are too long after she was challenged about 9,000 NHS Grampian patients waiting beyond the 12 treatment week target.
Her admission came when she was challenged by North East Tory MSP Peter Chapman at First Minister’s Questions.
In the Holyrood chamber, Mr Chapman asked Ms Sturgeon for her response to recent figures showing more than 9,000 people were waiting beyond the 12-week target for inpatient and day case admission within the health board area.
Mr Chapman asked the first minister if she recognised that the waiting figure had risen every year and was now eight times higher than it was in 2013.
He also said that NHS Grampian was the worst funded health board in Scotland, with a shortfall of £239 million over the last decade, based on official figures.
Mr Chapman added: “Does the first minister agree with me that the people of the north east deserve much better?”
Ms Sturgeon acknowledged that more needed to be done to tackle the problem, saying: “Right now waiting times are not as good as we want them to be, nor are they as good as patients deserve them to be.”
The first minster said Health Secretary Jeane Freeman would work with health boards to make improvements and said “record resources” were going into the NHS.
The North East MSP raised his concerns about the situation at NHS Grampian as the state of the health service dominated the weekly joust at Holyrood.
Stand-in Tory leader Jackson Carlaw condemned the Scottish Government’s waiting times record as an “unqualified failure”
Official figures for the last three months of 2018 indicate that across Scotland, 72.7% of people waiting for either inpatient or day treatment received it within 12 weeks – down from 80% in October to December 2017.
Ms Sturgeon said that since the introduction of the 12 week target more than 1.7 million patients received their treatment within the required timeframe.
Mr Carlaw also produced figures suggesting fewer safety and cleanliness inspections were being carried out in hospitals. The interim Tory leader said there had been 38 inspections in 2014/15 falling to 14 in the last 11 months.
Ms Sturgeon said the Healthcare Environment Inspectorate was responsible for carrying out inspections on “risk based” basis.
An NHS Grampian spokesman said: “We are committed to meeting the waiting times targets and acknowledge our current performance falls short of that for some patients.
“This is due to issues in recruiting to some specialist medical and nursing vacancies.
“Where we do not achieve the waiting standards set we actively manage the lists and ensure that patients are treated as soon as possible.
“We would like to reassure people that patients are always assessed based on their clinical need and those with urgent requirements are always seen first.”
