NICOLA Sturgeon’s attempts to calm fears over the NHS in Scotland have suffered a significant setback after one of the country’s most senior doctors warned that the service is at “breaking point”.

Peter Bennie, chair of the British Medical Association in Scotland, said the health service was nearing the time when some services could not be provided for patients.

When this happened, he said, there would be a “system breakdown”.

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Dr Bennie urged ministers to find the money and staff to head off a crisis which would cause severe problems for the whole country.

“We are pretty much to breaking point, just trying to keep things going,” said Dr Bennie.

Scottish Health Secretary Shona Robison said ministers appreciated that change was needed but she insisted that the SNP administration had already pledged to inject £2 billion more into the service over the next few years.

Dr Bennie’s comments represent the latest in a series of warnings over the state of the health service in Scotland.

Labour claimed yesterday that new analysis of statistics showed that more than 90,000 patients in Scotland had been forced to wait more than four hours for treatment at accident and emergency units in the last year.

The Liberal Democrats, meanwhile, publicised figures which, they claimed, show that there had been 60,000 assaults on health staff in Scotland since 2012.

The First Minister has come under increasing pressure over the state of the health service in Scotland over the last few weeks as winter pressures on services have intensified.

Ms Sturgeon has also come under fire from opposition parties who lambasted the Scottish Government in parliament last week after it emerged that the creation of four new national trauma centres is going be delayed for three years.

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Ms Robison will make a statement to MSPs on the trauma centres later this week, with the SNP’s opponents expected to use the opportunity to call for more resources to be invested in health.

Speaking on BBC Scotland’s Sunday Politics programme, Dr Bennie said more money was needed for health in Scotland but he also called on ministers to make health jobs more attractive by easing the pressures on those already working in the service.

Dr Bennie said the rising cost of drugs, the development of new technology and the ageing population all contributed to forcing up the cost of health.

And he claimed the health service needed a four per cent rise in funding every year, just to keep up with demand.

Dr Bennie said: “We are just fed up with a mantra from the government which says ‘we have more doctors than ever before’.

"The point is, we need more again in order to provide the service people require.

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“Right now, general practitioners are stretched to breaking point and a lot of what they are doing is work that could and should be done by other members of the community staff, but that staff isn’t there.”

The head of the Scottish BMA added that more and more doctors would leave if the pressures continued to mount.

Dr Bennie said: “It (the health service) can’t keep doing everything it is trying to do just now, we simply don’t have the resources in terms of people to do that.

“We simply don’t have staffing and enough financing. We have consultant posts vacant for over six months that are advertised that can’t be filled.

“What happens with that is that, all the other staff, consultants and other doctors and nurses, are taking on more work to try to keep things going, a majority of staff in the health service are working well beyond what they should be doing just to keep things running and eventually that leads to personal breakdown and eventually it leads to system breakdown.”

Asked what he meant by ‘system breakdown’, Dr Bennie replied: “It means the service can’t do what it has to do and we can’t look after patients in a safe way. Now we are not at that point now, but it is moving towards that.”

Anas Sarwar, for Labour, described Dr Bennie’s remarks as an “incredibly serious warning”.

He added: “It is painfully clear that the SNP's failure to properly workforce plan has left our NHS staff over-worked, under-valued and under-resourced.

"This has left our NHS struggling to cope with demand, and in the grip of a workforce crisis.”