Scotland's A&E departments "consistently" outperform those in England and Wales, the health secretary has said.

Shona Robison's comments come on the day new figures released by NHS Scotland show health boards missed the A&E waiting times target for each week of December.

It means the key target was missed for the fifth month in a row.

The health secretary insisted, however, that Scotland's devolved health service is performing better than NHS England and NHS Wales.

Robison said: "We know that winter brings additional pressures and I would like to thank our dedicated NHS staff for all of the hard work they've put in over the festive period.

"The festive season is always a challenging time but through weekly monitoring we know boards are sustaining performance at similar levels to the equivalent period last year and better than the equivalent period in 2015.

"Nationally, our emergency departments are still maintaining a high level of performance and Scotland's A&E waiting times have consistently outperformed other areas of the UK for at least the past 20 months - the latest comparable published data shows that Scotland's core performance was 93.1% compared to 83.7% in England and 77.9% in Wales in October."

In the final week of December, 7.7% of patients were not admitted, transferred or discharge from A&E departments.

The Scottish Government has set the NHS a target of ensuring 5% or less of patients wait more than four hours.

Percentage of A&E patients waiting for more than four hours in week ending:

Scottish Labour rejected the health secretary's description of "high level performance" of the NHS.

The party's health spokesman Anas Sarwar said: "The SNP is sleepwalking into an NHS crisis and is in complete denial about its mismanagement of our most valued public service.

"Today's figures show that A&E performance in Scotland is getting worse compared to this time last year.

"In the past week Labour has revealed the extent of the pressure on our health service - from increasing levels of cancelled operations, more than a thousand patients being failed on cancer treatment waiting times and the scandal of patients dying while waiting to be discharged from hospital."

He added: "In our biggest city of Glasgow, unacceptable levels of people are waiting too long at A&E.

"NHS staff are being let down by an SNP government which would rather stick its head in the sand than deal with the real problems.

"The NHS crisis in England shows you can't trust the Tories with the NHS but it is shameful that the SNP uses that as an excuse to spin away its failures.

"The NHS in Scotland has been under the SNP's complete control for a decade."