BRAIN surgeons at a major hospital are suffering "plummeting morale" from having to turn patients away due to a lack of beds, MSPs have been told, as it emerged that the number of patients waiting more than four hours in Scotland's emergency departments hit a record high last week.

Liberal Democrat MSP Alex Cole-Hamilton told Holyrood's Health and Sport Committee that Mr Patrick Statham, a consultant neurosurgeon at the Western General in Edinburgh, had contacted him after the hospital was forced to cancel a number of planned operations due to a shortage of beds.

Mr Cole-Hamilton said: "He was very concerned that he felt that the levels of cancellations in his ward due to the unavailability of beds because of the lack of ring-fencing in the neurology department was getting to the stage where his morale and the morale of his fellow surgeons was really plummeting because they kept having to turn people away."

Jacquie Campbell, Interim Chief Officer, NHS Lothian, said: “Like all health boards across the country we are currently experiencing a high demand for our services which has an impact across all of our hospital departments.

“Our dedicated teams are working hard to prioritise patients by clinical need and in some instances appointment dates require to be changed. I apologise to anyone who has had their appointment rescheduled."

She added that additional funding would be used to have patients treated more quickly in the private sector.

It comes as Scotland's core A&E departments recorded their worst ever performance in the first week of 2017.

The latest statistics show that 87.9 per cent of of the 25,066 patients who attended A&E in the week ending January 8 were seen, treated and then admitted or discharged within four hours, against a Scottish Government's target of 95 per cent. For the first time, more than 100 patients also waited longer than 12 hours.

However, Health Minister Shona Robison said Scotland's emergency departments were coping with increased demand. The number of attendances last week was four per cent higher than the same week in 2016, when 88 per cent of patients were dealt with within four hours.

She added: "While there are undoubtedly seasonal pressures on our frontline healthcare services at the moment, the latest available data shows Scotland’s hospitals are performing ten percentage points better than England’s and 15 percentage points better than Wales."

Dr Martin McKechnie, vice-chair of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine in Scotland, said the year-on-year performance showed the service was "bearing up".

Dr McKechnie added: "The general feeling is that it is not as bad as it has been in previous years and the bounce-back from it has been much quicker. But there are still significant issues with us accessing inpatient capacity, and it is invariably the frail elderly who are having these long waits. We're not talking the walking wounded - we're talking wee old ladies who need to be in hospital because there's nowhere else for them to be.

"That's why I support any investment in social care and primary care to help move patients out of hospital, because that's how we will achieve better care."

Compliance at two emergency departments - the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow and Hairmyres Hospital in Lanarkshire - dipped below 75 per cent, with the QEUH recording its worst performance to date.

It comes less than a month after health board chiefs launched a "root and branch" review of A&E in the wake of its previous worst ever week in the run-up to Christmas.

A spokesman for NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde said: "Although performance fluctuates across individual hospitals, the QEUH included, the Board as a whole continues to make progress in meeting unscheduled care challenges."