15th April 2011

The next Campaign Meeting for St John’s Hospital will take place at the Kaim Park Hotel at 7.30 pm on Wednesday April 20th.

This newsletter is dedicated to the memory of Marion Mackay who died recently after a long illness which she bore with great dignity and courage.

Marion was a founder member of the SDC. She made a huge contribution to the campaign and, to the end, she was passionate about her family, her community and St John’s Hospital.

She recognised the simple truth that when people become ill they need to be cared for in a high quality hospital close to home surrounded by family and friends. Like many in West Lothian, she knew that NHS Lothian Board were making a huge mistake when they centralised many services to Edinburgh hospitals.

We charge the Board with mismanagement. They have made second class citizens of West Lothian residents who now have to travel to Edinburgh for care they could have received at St John’s. Worse still, they are paying for the Board’s mistakes.

The first big mistake of the Board was to build the Royal infirmary (RIE) using a PFI contract which was biased in favour of the contractors. Not only will the Board pay over 1200 million pounds for the RIE, but it will become the property of the builders in 2028 when the contract expires. This is utter madness.

The next mistake of the Board was to centralise services a few years ago. We in West Lothian knew that the RIE couldn’t cope with the extra work. We told the Board. They didn’t consult us and they refused to listen when we tried to protest. Their senior managers were full of arrogance and greed. Greed? As the services were centralised the salaries of the top team grew like topsy – out of control and with no respect for the thousands of people from West Lothian who now had to pay to travel to the RIE and also pay a fortune to park when they got there. The Board simply didn’t care.

As we predicted, the RIE ran out of space as they tried to cope with the extra patients. So the Board decided to move some offices out of the RIE and out of their HQ at the Deaconess Hospital to plush new premises in Waverley Gate right in the centre of Edinburgh. The ultimate insult was that West Lothian people were all set to pay for this since the Board decided to sell the Deaconess Hospital for 4 million pounds. This asset belongs to the public – us – and once it is sold it is lost forever. We fought against the sale of public assets from the start of our campaign and our efforts appear to have borne fruit. The government has just announced that the proceeds of any asset sales should go to the whole of the Scottish NHS and not to just one health board. The SDC applauds this decision. Of course, it makes a mockery of NHS Lothian planning. They have sold over 100 million pounds of assets (which used to belong to us) to fund their mismanagement. In other words, NHS Lothian has not been able to balance its books for years. The public and politicians were fooled by men and women from NHS Lothian Board who simply kept selling off public assets to make ends meet. The Board gave no thought as to what would happen when they had sold everything. The senior management didn’t care because they knew that they would be drawing their huge pensions by the time the chickens came home to roost.

The SDC supports no political party. But we will fight to ensure that the next Scottish government keeps its promise to prevent NHS Lothian from profiting from the sale of even more assets.

Remember, YOU paid to allow the Board to remove services from St John’s!

The madness continues. The Board has now decided to store the medical casenotes containing highly confidential information about West Lothian people in large containers in the car parks around St John’s. You couldn’t make it up! Look for yourself. There is a large container outside what used to be the mortuary at St John’s. Anyone could break in and help themselves to your records. The Board doesn’t care.

The SDC has said from the outset that at every twist and turn, it is the people of West Lothian that pay the price for decisions made in Edinburgh that benefit Edinburgh people. We are the poor relations. Our hospital is robbed of services so that Edinburgh folk can have them on their doorstep. Our assets are sold to pay for additional beds at the RIE. Our services are cut further when NHS Lothian make cuts.

Edinburgh has far far more specialist doctors than St John’s. Vacancies at St John’s are deliberately left unfilled. When key people resign they are not replaced. NHS Lothian wants to make St John’s a large geriatric hospital. The elderly, after all, don’t complain.

They will fob us off with a short stay surgical unit. But this isn’t a patch on the superb emergency surgical services we used to have. Even now, St John’s could cater for many patients that are being transported to Edinburgh. People with simple fractures could be looked after at St John’s. The Board doesn’t care.

Staffing levels at St John’s have been cut to dangerous levels. Often, it is nursing students that are left on their own to look after really sick patients. The SDC predicts that this will result in a disaster. God forbid that it is not as bad as the Royal Edinburgh psychiatric hospital where staffing has been reduced to the point where patients attempt to murder each other! Read it in the Evening News. The Board doesn’t care.

The SDC mourns Marion. But we are determined to be faithful to her ambition to return services to St John’s and to prevent the Board from making the situation at St John’s even worse.

We believe that wherever you live you should have access to roughly the same services as everyone else. This is NOT the case at present. NHS Lothian Board has failed us. We are going to publicise every bad thing they do. It’s called naming and shaming.

Join us at the Kaim Park at 7.30pm on April 20th. Find out more and be part of the fight to make St John’s better!

The SDC team