THE National Health Service and the SNP's handling of healthcare in Scotland have once again been dominating the headlines over recent weeks and months.

In particular, the situation in NHS Tayside has been shocking. Years of mismanagement, including the recently- revealed misuse of charitable funds, has led to a string of departures from NHS Tayside's senior management team.

The Scottish Government has presided over a situation where the financial scrutiny of health boards and integration joint boards has been significantly lacking with some people calling for the cabinet secretary for health and sport, Shona Robison, to step aside in the wake of the scandal.

The Scottish Government has even been forced to put special measures in place to ensure the future sustainability of the board.

Sadly, the problems are not limited to NHS Tayside. NHS Grampian saw only a quarter of people living with months of chronic pain within the SNP's target of 18 weeks in the last three months of 2017.

Staggeringly, in NHS North Ayrshire and Arran, this figure was just six per cent of patients. Moreover, NHS boards failed to meet their target of starting treatment for 95 per cent of patients within two months for every single type of cancer.

Living with such conditions can have a terrible impact on people's lives without the right support and these figures are therefore extremely disappointing.

Closer to home in NHS Forth Valley, which covers the Wee County, we have also seen scandalous stories of people's ordeals with the National Health Service.

Very recently, a lady with terminal brain cancer was forced to endure what she described as excruciating pain and to wait more than three hours for treatment after an ambulance failed to arrive and her husband was forced to drive her to the hospital.

The First Minister apologised at a recent Question Time session but the lady has joined calls for Shona Robison's resignation.

The Scottish Conservatives have been working hard to improve aspects of healthcare in Scotland and have put pressure on the Scottish Government to rethink some of their positions.

A good example of this is the work we undertook to improve the provision of benefits for terminally-ill patients, which the SNP's original bill had proposed to limit to a period of six months. We in the Conservatives were able to force the SNP to commit to assessing all patients individually to ensure that they had the appropriate level of support.

Despite being in charge of our health system for more than 10 years, the SNP have done little to improve the provision of healthcare for Scots up and down the country. Time and again, we see examples of incompetence and ineptitude, which simply is not good enough.

The SNP need to shift their focus from matters constitutional and onto things that really matter to hard-working families such as whether or not they can get the treatment that they deserve and in a reasonably short period of time.