New figures reveal an explosion in serious incidents involving patients which have had to be reported to regulators as hospitals struggle to cope.
04:30, 30 Nov 2025Updated 08:26, 30 Nov 2025
Hospital staff are warning that the NHS crisis is getting worse
Nurses have said they are facing a “mission impossible” to keep patients safe on overflowing wards as the NHS is plunged into a winter flu crisis. It comes as new figures reveal an explosion in serious incidents involving patients which have had to be reported to regulators as hospitals struggle to cope.
At least 3,629 Significant Adverse Event Reviews (SAER) had to be carried out between 2020 and 2024 – hundreds of which involved unexpected deaths, treatment delays, heart attacks and falls. Scottish Labour has accused the SNP of failing patients after it emerged the number of reviews had soared by 55per cent in just four years.
Scottish Labour health spokesperson Jackie Baillie MSP said: “The NHS has been plunged into crisis because of years of SNP mismanagement. It is deeply worrying that there were more than 3,600 serious patient care incidents in just four years across our health boards.
Scottish Labour’s health spokeswoman Jackie Baillie(Image: Getty)
“This highlights the extent to which services have been pushed to breaking point, with patient safety being put at risk. Frontline teams are being stretched to their limits with no relief in sight, with the SNP having utterly failed to recruit and retain staff.
“This must be the last winter that the SNP are in charge of our health service. Our NHS urgently needs a change in direction.” A staggering 1,221 reviews took place in NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde alone, while across all health boards issues involving delays to treatment rose 120 percent.
A SAER is carried out and reported to Healthcare Improvement Scotland after an incident that could have caused or did cause harm to a patient, staff member, or visitor. NHS 24 was last week forced to send text messages to thousands of patents warning it had been “inundated” with calls from patients concerned about flu symptoms, especially among school-aged children.
NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde has asked people with flu to treat themselves at home if at all possible rather than attending A&E. And in an exclusive interview Colin Pullman, director of the Royal College of Nursing Scotland, said he feared an impending crisis, with inappropriate “corridor care” already the norm on wards and a lack of basic resources and staff.
A general view of the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow(Image: Getty Images)
He said: “It is so depressing when you hear the government talking about enhanced plans for winter when we are already in November. We should in fact be talking about winter planning for next year, not this year.
“We are struggling to deal with peaks in demand and there are no real troughs. The issue which has become normalised is corridor care – which is another way of saying care in inappropriate places.
“People are being treated in nooks and crannies in hospitals. We are having to find a room or an office and turn it into a treatment space.
“That is a real issue for people’s dignity and also in relation to access to oxygen and other vital supplies.
“We carried out a survey of staff on corridor care and staff are still saying to us that they are delivering in inappropriate places every day which is putting patients at risk.
“There is not enough nursing staff. We have never got to the point in Scotland where we have employed the number of nurses for which we have vacancies for never mind the actual level that we need.
“Unfortunately we are in for a hard, hard winter. One nurse made a comment in a meeting – she described her work as ‘mission impossible’.
“There is a danger of a real crisis this year as there was last year, especially because of a very bad flu season. I would encourage everyone who is entitled to a flu jab to make sure that they get it.
“Nurses are can do people, day in and day out they do the best that they can but also they get frustrated at not being able to deliver the levels of care that they want to.”
The NHS is urging eligible people to get vaccinated against flu(Image: Getty)
The Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) has reveal there were more than 800 deaths associated with long A&E waits before admission in Scotland last year – an increase of a third from the 2023 figure.
Pullman added: “It is unforgivable if people are dying because there are not adequate resources in the NHS.
“I look at it in a wider sense as well. Death is a huge thing for nurses and making sure that they get the time to treat families with the dignity and respect they deserve when they have lost a loved one.
“We don’t have enough nurses and there is not enough beds in hospitals because of the amount of people who should be getting care delivered in other places.
“We use that horrible word delayed discharge, but I prefer to say patients who shouldn’t be in hospital because they could be better cared for in the community of the resources were in place.
“When we have rows of ambulances waiting to get into hospitals, that is a symptom that hospitals are full to the brim and that people are probably not getting the treatment they require.”
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One nurse at Glasgow’s QEUH who didn’t want to be named said: “It is incredibly busy and there is a lot of flu going about which inevitably ends up hitting staff too.
“The simple fact is that we won’t have the resources in any part of the NHS to cope properly – from A&E to all other department, an it is going to get worse as the winter goes on. It should be a wake up call but unfortunately little ever seems to change.”
Scottish Conservative shadow health secretary Dr Sandesh Gulhane MSP said: “Our NHS is facing a perfect storm as it sleepwalks towards a winter meltdown on the SNP’s watch.
“Years of nationalist underfunding and disastrous workforce planning have pushed staff to the brink.
“Corridor care is now the dangerous norm in our hospitals which is putting lives at risk.
“We’re facing the toughest winter on record, with an early and brutal flu season already putting more pressure on an already overwhelmed system.
“Neil Gray failed to outline his winter NHS plan until the eleventh hour and it wasn’t the worth the paper it was written on.
“He needs to cut the spin and urgently adopt our common-sense plans to cut bureaucracy and get resources to the frontline, otherwise the consequences will be devastating.”
Health Secretary Neil Gray said: “Patient safety is our first priority and our thoughts are with everyone affected by these incidents.
“Learning from significant adverse event reviews must be used to prevent similar events and contribute to continuous improvement across healthcare services.”