John Swinney: 10-hour ambulance wait for footballer ‘completely unacceptable’

John Swinney has said a Queen’s Park player’s 10-hour wait for an ambulance was “completely unacceptable”.  

The first minister confirmed that the Scottish Ambulance Service (SAS) is investigating the circumstances that led to the incident.  

It comes after Queen’s Park defender Charlie Fox suffered a dislocated knee during a match against Partick Thistle on Saturday afternoon in Glasgow and was left to wait into the early hours of the next morning for an ambulance. 

The injury was so severe that play stopped for around 10 minutes, however the ambulance did not arrive for 10 hours.  

The SAS said the delays were due to services being under significant pressure and “extended hospital handover delays”.  

Swinney told the chamber during First Minister’s Questions that Fox’s wait “appears to me to be completely unacceptable”. 

He apologised to the footballer and added: “I would say that our public services continue to operate under enormous pressure, but they also deliver fantastic service to members of the public in most cases.  

“Not in all cases, and where they don’t deliver, they can expect the first minister to address those issues and to apologise accordingly.” 

The issue was raised by Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar, who grilled Swinney on ambulance waiting times and raised the issue of Fox’s injury. 

The incident comes just a month after Swinney apologised at FMQs to young footballer Brooke Paterson, who waited five hours for an ambulance after breaking her leg while playing for Linlithgow Rose during a game in North Lanarkshire in September.  

The first minister said it appeared that ambulance call had been misclassified, which meant it was not treated “the priority it should have had”. 

“That is not acceptable,” Swinney said.  

Sarwar also raised figures that showed life-threatening cases seen by an ambulance within 10 minutes have fallen from 83 per cent a decade ago to 61 per cent.  

He said: “That is shocking. Why is this situation continuing to get worse and worse on John Swinney's watch?” 

The first minister responded: “I recognise that there will be occasions in which public services do not meet the expectations of members of the public.” 

Swinney said, “the right thing to do” is to be “honest and open with the public in apologising when those standards are not met”.  

He told the chamber that Scottish ambulance staffing is up by 31 per cent in the last 10 years, including a 57.6 per cent rise in paramedics, and that median response times for purple calls, the category designated for the most critically ill patients who are identified as having a 10 per cent or more chance of cardiac arrest, was seven minutes 51 seconds, according to the most recent data.