NICOLA STURGEON has insisted progress is being made in tackling bed blocking in Scotland’s hospitals despite Labour saying the problem has escalated under her watch.

The First Minister came under fire from Kezia Dugdale, who said that last year people had remained in hospital for 612,000 days when they were well enough to go home because of a lack of care services.

She told MSPs at Holyrood that the SNP leader had told her party’s conference in 2011 that patients had spent 200,000 days in a hospital bed when they did not need to.

The Scottish Labour leader said: “In the last year, patients in Scotland spent more than 612,000 days in a hospital bed when they were fit to go home. That means it has more than trebled under the SNP Government since this First Minister admitted there was something badly wrong. So, by any measure that is unacceptable.”

Sturgeon said the problem of bed blocking – also known as delayed discharges – was “hugely important” and had been the focus of Scottish Government efforts. “Since 2007 there’s been a 52 per cent reduction in delays over four weeks, a 55 per cent reduction in delays over six weeks, the number of delays over three days is down by 50 per cent,” she told MSPs yesterday.

“Having delivered the target of zero delays over six weeks, we’ve progressively toughened that target and we’re now focusing on ensuring patients are discharged within 72 hours.

“As long as one patient is delayed in hospital longer than they should be, then we’ve got work to do.”

She added that with 10,000 fewer bed days lost in July 2015 than in December last year, “any reasonable person” looking at the figures would “say that we are making considerable progress”.

The two party leaders clashed on the issue in sometimes noisy exchanges at First Minister’s Questions at Holyrood.

Dugdale said she did “not doubt for a minute the First Minister’s sincerity” over the issue but continued to press her.

The First Minister added: “I think it is something to be welcomed that the number of bed days lost in July, we saw this in statistics earlier this week, was down by nearly 10,000 since December last year. Just to put that into context, that is the equivalent of every acute medical bed in NHS Highland for an entire month.”

She insisted the number of people being kept in hospital when they no longer needed medical care was falling, saying in August this year there were 731 patients delayed more than three days and 481 who were held up by more than two weeks.

During FMQs, Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson also accused the Scottish Government of “vote chasing and political calculation” over its decision to ban genetically modified (GM) crops.

Davidson argued the ban had been announced without proper consultation of Scotland’s science community, or food and drink and farming industries.

She said the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE), which has published a report on the subject, was the latest of about 30 scientific, academic and farming organisations to raise concerns about the move.

But Sturgeon hit back and said: “Our scientific adviser was consulted on the scientific background, which was made available to ministers prior to this decision, but that was not our primary factor in reaching a conclusion.

“We took the decision we took on GM crops because we wanted to protect our food and drink sector and the clean, green environment on which the success of that sector depends. It is everything to do with jobs and everything to do with industry.”