HEALTH secretary Shona Robison faced renewed calls to quit yesterday after the revelation that her health service failed to dispatch an ambulance to a terminal brain cancer patient.

Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard said that more than 16,000 emergency ambulances had taken longer than an hour to arrive on the scene last year.

He raised the case of Margaret Goodman, a woman from Clackmannanshire receiving palliative care for brain cancer.

“She told me that, just before midnight on Saturday April 9, her husband Gavin found her curled up in excruciating pain,” Mr Leonard told Nicola Sturgeon at First Minister’s Questions yesterday.

Ms Goodman’s palliative care nurses phoned three times for an ambulance over two hours before "Gavin got in his car and drove Margaret to Forth Valley hospital in Larbert himself,” Mr Leonard said.

“She had to wait at a packed A&E late on a Saturday night, so she wasn’t treated with morphine until three o’clock in the morning.

“The debate about our NHS is not just about statistics in the end. It is about real lives and real people like Margaret.”

Ms Sturgeon pledged “to personally look into this case and the Health Secretary will do likewise.”

She told MSPs: "If [Ms Goodman] received care that was not of the standard she expected and from what Richard Leonard has outlined today it certainly appears that that is the case, then of course she deserves an apology and I offer that to her."

Ms Robison has been under fire for her handling of a financial crisis at NHS Tayside, the health board which covers her constituency.

Ramping up the pressure yesterday, Mr Leonard said: “The question for Nicola Sturgeon is simple.

“How much more failure must people endure before she realises that we need a change in our NHS, starting with a change of health secretary?”

Scottish Lib Dem leader Willie Rennie reiterated the call, pointing to the case of a pregnant woman forced to endure a long ambulance journey owing to a maternity unit closure in the highlands.

He said “change is needed at the top” and “the health secretary has to go.”

And Labour frontbencher Neil Findlay completed the hat-trick, saying Ms Robison should stand aside in favour of someone who will "get a grip of this disaster in general practice."

The First Minister retorted: “The opposition might want to continue to play politics with this.

“We will continue to focus on the hard work of supporting our national health service and delivering for patients.”