Shona Robison has insisted she is keeping “a very close eye” on acute NHS staff shortages after a damning report revealed the scale of the crisis.
The health secretary faced a grilling from opposition MSPs after new figures revealed more doctors and nurses left their jobs in north and north-east Scotland than in any other part of the country last year.
Labour’s Neil Findlay demanded to know what was being done boost recruitment and cut spending on agency staff.
An Audit Scotland report revealed that some health boards in the north were forking out more than £80 an hour to hire agency nurses to plug gaps.
But Ms Robison claimed spending on temporary staff was higher when Labour was in government.
She told the Scottish Parliament yesterday: “There is a difficulty in recruiting specialists. I am keeping a very close eye on that.
“But he mentioned agency spend – I don’t know if the member is aware but the previous administration spent more in its last three years on agency spend than we have in the whole of our time in administration.”
The Holyrood debate was held against the backdrop of a warning from the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) that Scotland was facing a retirement “time bomb”.
The college’s chief executive, Cathy Warwick, said: “What worries me in particular is the retirement time bomb that our report unearths. Not only in England, but across the UK, we are not seeing enough new midwives being taken on.”
Labour’s public services spokesman Dr Richard Simpson said: “Our NHS needs to be fit for the future but we are looking at potentially disastrous shortages of midwives and family doctors because of cuts made by this SNP government.
“Our health service is facing a staffing time bomb because of the SNP’s sticking plaster approach. The SNP’s handling of workforce planning has been an absolute disaster.
“Last week the experts at Audit Scotland exposed the extent of the problems in our NHS under the SNP government as they have cut the health budget.
“These problems in our NHS did not appear overnight, they began on the first minister’s watch. Under the SNP government NHS staff are undervalued, under resourced and under intolerable pressure.”
Scotland’s public health minister and north-east MSP Maureen Watt said that NHS Scotland met the RCM’s recommended midwife to birth ratio, but added that the SNP was not “complacent” about the issue.