NHS Scotland has failed to meet its A&E waiting times target for the seventh month in a row.

The health service is tasked by the Scottish Government with making sure no more than 5% of patients wait longer than four hours to be admitted, transferred or discharged from A&E departments.

On average over the past 12 months, 5.9 % of patients waited more than four hours.

In February, NHS Scotland again failed to meet the 5% target with 7.5% of patients waiting longer than the four-hour limit.

A total of 1111 patients had to wait eight hours to be seen, double the government's target.

During February, 118,803 people attended A&E departments in Scotland.

A Scottish Government spokesperson said: "It's welcome that A&E performance has improved again this week thanks to the efforts of NHS staff, and that we have seen an improvement in the monthly times too.

"For at least 23 consecutive months, Scotland's core A&Es have been the best performing in the UK, over 13 percentage points better than England on the latest comparable statistics - that's the largest gap in the six and half years of data which has been available".

Scottish Labour's health spokesman Anas Sarwar said: "This is the seventh month in a row that the SNP government has missed its A&E target. Staff are not getting the support they need to deliver the care Scots deserve.

"SNP ministers are too busy running a campaign for a divisive second independence referendum when they should be focused on running our NHS."

A spokesman for the Scottish Greens said: "Evidently there has been a small improvement, compared to last month, but once again waiting time targets have been missed.

"We need to see a greater effort in recruitment and retention of staff, not just in A&E but in our GP surgeries and in social care to minimise the need to visit and stay in hospital where possible."