Talking-up Scotland

© ALAMY

Regular readers will have seen earlier reports here of the mainstream media’s proxy war on the SNP misusing the NHS as a weapon to do so. See:

Poxy Unionist media unfairly attack NHS in proxy war against SNP

Pressure on Herald editor to resign over misrepresentation of NHS successes as Health Secretary is nominated for award as most successful in UK

Here’s the headline and some text:

‘Shona Robison under fire over ‘snub’ to doctors discussing pressures of NHS’

‘Doctors gathered to protest about working conditions in the NHS at Holyrood yesterday amid claims by opposition parties that Health Secretary Shona Robison had “snubbed” their meeting. A small group demonstrated outside the Scottish ­Parliament saying the demands of the job have left many of them feeling “stressed and exhausted”. They were there to raise to discuss staffing and workload pressures, “burnout” and a potential blame culture of overworked NHS staff.’

Two things, in particular, made the report ‘dishonest journalism’.

First and most obvious, the use of the term ‘doctors’, in the headline, and ‘small’, in the text, seeks to hide the fact that there were only 4 doctors there out of a total population, in Scotland’s hospitals and practices, of more than 20 000! So, 0.02% of the profession makes for a very unrepresentative sample.

Second, perhaps explaining the teeny size of the protest and the failure of the Health Secretary to find the time for them, the doctors were actually there to show support for a doctor struck off in England. See:

‘The doctors raised the case of Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garba, who was struck off the medical register after being convicted of manslaughter on the grounds of gross negligence for the death of a patient. Wearing T-shirts with the slogan I Am Hadiza, ­campaigners from the Scottish Action for Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garba group argued her case should have been treated as corporate ­failure rather than that of an individual doctor. Six-year-old Jack Adcock died while under her care in England in 2011, while she was working a 13-hour shift in an understaffed paediatric unit [In Leicester, England]. Doctors have expressed fears that a culture of stress and overwork could lead to mistakes being made in Scotland.’

https://www.scotsman.com/news/uk/shona-robison-under-fire-over-snub-to-doctors-discussing-pressures-of-nhs-1-4730562

Should ‘Scottish Action for Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garba’ have gone south to make their protest?