Alastair Noble: " NHS Highland is continuing down a road of pouring money into Raigmore’s overspend"

At the joint meeting of the West and Suburban CCs in Nairn Academy on Tuesday night, Dick Youngson, chairing the meeting said that the proposals from Nairn Health Care Group for the Community Councils to take on the Patients Group Consultation role would be discussed at the coming meeting of all Nairnshire Community Councils on the 2nd of December. Dick said:

“The way that it is sort of panning out now through Community Councils suits the practice. There is no doubt about that. Community Councils are a very good vehicle for disseminating information from them and feeding back information to them. I know that Alastair is helping and acting as an advisor.”

Retired GP and Community Councillor, Alastair Noble then spoke: “I’m happy to update. I had a meeting with the partners today and there’s a real willingness to rebuild the relationship between the practice and the Nairnshire community. Part of that will be into proper locality planning and community capacity and all of that is against the new integrated role. What I’m about to say will come as no surprise to anybody who has ever heard me talking for the last 20 or 30 years.

Because of some of the work I’m doing elsewhere, elsewhere they’ve looked at an integrated door through strategic provision with integrated care and that means looking at what the Health Board has been doing and what the local authority has been doing and trying to get them together. Unfortunately and this is the serious point about what I’m going to say: NHS Highland is continuing down a road of pouring money into Raigmore’s overspend and there’s absolutely no doubt in my mind and we saw the first real example of it with this affair at A&E at Nairn over the weekend, that they are squeezing community care, social work, the GPs, District Nurses, the hospital, everybody. I think there is a real, real worry that Nairn has to stand here and be absolutely clear that we have to have a community capacity to deliver a range of services that we in Nairn are used to.

[...] Can I make this absolutely clear this will mean that the practice will not be just accountable to the accountants, they are going to have to be much more accountable to the whole public and within that locality planning document there’s going to be a lot more information about how the practice, the staff, the hospital, the whole locality perform against the rest of Scotland and that pattern is available so we've got a much clear idea. So to my mind it is absolutely essential that the practice, the medical staff, the Social Work staff, the local authority staff and all the patients and the Community of Nairn are very aware that these cuts are going to be really difficult. My position is absolutely plain that if Nairn got its fair share of resources we would be able to do that. Now we haven’t had our fair share of resources through the good times and to the best of our ability we should make sure we are not penalised by taking our fair share of cuts when money gets tight so it is absolutely essential we get this right."