Swinney visited NHS 24 and Scottish Ambulance Service staff who are preparing for the busy festive period.<\/p>\n
He urged people to ensure they get the right care at the right place by checking the NHS inform website in the first instance if they become unwell.<\/p>\n
People should call 111 for urgent but non-life-threatening concerns, mental health support, or advice when local services are closed.<\/p>\n
Swinney said: “We know that demand for the NHS increases quite substantially over the festive period and there are a number of steps you can take to help yourself if you become unwell.<\/p>\n
“A&E is expected to be exceptionally busy in the coming weeks so only attend if you have a genuine emergency that requires urgent medical treatment.”<\/p>\n
Scottish Ambulance Service chief executive Michael Dickson said: “Winter is always an exceptionally busy period and as demand on our service increases, we’re asking the public to use our service responsibly by only phoning 999 in a life-threatening emergency.<\/p>\n
“Currently over 50% of our calls are managed without having to take patients to A&E. However, for those who do need hospital treatment, system-wide pressures, including lengthy handover times in key areas, are having a direct impact on our ability to get crews back on the road to reach other patients.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Swinney visited NHS 24 and Scottish Ambulance Service staff who are preparing for the busy festive period. He…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":331712,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-331711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=331711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331711\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/331712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=331711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=331711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=331711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}