Scotland’s Health Minister faced a showdown with MSP Jackie Baillie in the Holyrood chamber recently.
The Dumbarton politician demanded that Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care, Neil Gray, update the chamber on action taken to reduce the wait for ambulances outside hospitals.
It comes as data reveals that ambulances are still racking up long waits outside the country’s A&E departments.
Data from the Scottish Ambulance Service revealed that more than half of their crews were stuck on hospital forecourts for more than 45 minutes in 2025.
In 2019, just 16 percent of ambulances spent more than 45 minutes at hospitals before being redeployed.
But figures show that the number of ambulances facing waits has increased every year since.
In 2025, 55 per cent of ambulances were stuck awaiting hospital handover.
Figures for January 6th until March 23rd this year, show that in NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, one ambulance waited for 9 hours and 47 minutes at struggling Queen Elizabeth University Hospital.
A crew were also stuck for 7 hours 14 minutes at Paisley’s Royal Alexandra Hospital.
Meanwhile, the actual number of patients taken to hospital by ambulance fell by 9,156 between 2019 and 2024.
Jackie, also Scottish Labour’s Spokesperson for Health, asked her opposite number to consider imposing a maximum waiting time target for patients to be transferred into hospital from ambulances.
The Cabinet Secretary declined, saying the Scottish Government had ensured improvements and called ambulance service performance “robust”.
MSP Jackie said: “Ambulances are a lifeline at a time of desperate need, but these figures show that year after year, the SNP has let emergency services slide.
“Our paramedics do a tremendous job, but rather than responding to desperate patients, ambulances are stuck at the doors of A&E because the SNP has failed to tackle the chaos within.
“We need to free up hospital beds and restore the family doctor so that patients at A&E can be treated in a timely manner and paramedics can do the job they were trained for.
“The Cabinet Secretary cannot pull the wool over our eyes by fudging the figures”.
