A broken leg, a phone without a signal and a snapshot of failure

T he other weekend my younger brother Murdo was out for a walk on the west side of Lewis. he was not rock climbing. he was not abseiling. And, though well away from the nearest road, he was on an established footpath – just walking.

And then, he recalls, ‘it had been raining and the path was wet and there was a loose gravelly bit and I just slipped – went cart-wheeling, and I seemed to be a long time in the air, and I knew it wasn’t going to end well…’

he crashed down with his full weight on his right foot and there was an immediate and sickening crack, ‘like electricity all through me’. And there Murdo lay, seriously injured, out of sight of homestead or man, as chill nausea flooded through him.

he took a minute or so to get his breath back and then, as the pain set in, fumbled for his mobile phone. There was no signal. A nurse by training, Murdo fought away panic and took cold stock.

‘I knew I could not put any weight on that foot,’ he says, ‘and that if I tried, I could do myself permanent injury…’

There was nothing for it but to crawl and crawl, over damp bog and gnarled rock. And crawl he did, hundreds of yards, till at last the welcome bars of live mobile reception showed on his phone… and it took him a long time.

he dialled 999 and found himself speaking to a lady far, far away, who had never in all her puff heard of the Isle of Lewis and seemed to struggle with his accent.

She demanded a postcode for his locale (which few of us, in such circumstances, could furnish off the top of our heads) and he explained to her he was near such-and-such a turn of the road by a village called Tolsta Chaolais. ‘Whit? Ye’ll huv tae spell that…’ Fortunately, Murdo has excellent Gaelic. But it seemed an age before ambulance and paramedics arrived and for some minutes the possibility of calling out a helicopter was weighed. By his own suggestion – having friends in the township – he was finally retrieved by tractor and trailer, by which point he was desperately glad of proffered gas-and-air anaesthetic.

Murdo is now safely home with a magnificent plaster and more metal in his ankle than down the local swing park but his ordeal highlighted some unnerving aspects of modern (and especially rural) Scotland.

ONe is the extent of patchy or non-existent mobile network coverage. even today, the Outer hebrides are full of ‘not’ spots. There are some in my own house: a decent signal almost everywhere in my office – but not at my desk.

There are trout lochs miles from any highway where I enjoy the full five bars – but not in the checkout queue at the local Co-op.

And Lewis is actually quite well off for mobile reception – there are parts of the highland mainland where the service is atrocious. Where much of rural Scotland really lags behind, too, is in decent and reliable broadband.

Our MSP for the Western Isles has recently been agitating over reduced and inadequate broadband speed in Stornoway itself – the largest town on Scotland’s west coast north of Fort William – and, in elgin, Moray, one important online business cannot access high-speed broadband at all.

Andrew Mulholland runs the delightfully named gaming concern hunted Cow. his enterprise desperately needs modern connectivity but (because it is hooked to BT’s data exchange, not the public grid) cannot get it.

Admittedly, much of rural Scotland is of low population density and in mountainous and challenging terrain, but in successive elections we have been promised proper 21stcentury internet service and, for tens of thousands of homes, the advance of fibre-optic cabling and ADSL remains painfully slow.

But, communications aside, my brother’s nightmarish experience also draws attention to how dreadfully centralised so many of our public services have become, to the point where more and more time is being wasted, people in desperate straits have to wait longer for help and lives are surely being lost.

even in the 1980s, on Lewis, a local ambulance could be despatched directly once the 999 call had been logged by someone who knew the island well – not by someone in a vast Central Belt call centre to whom all the land much north of Milngavie is so much here-bedragons. But Western Isles ambulance call-out was centralised, in 1989, to Perth. No longer could a mere GP or the local police officer himself telephone Angus the ambulance down the road.

And the risk of confusion has been confounded still further with the advent of the notorious NhS 24, whose insouciance and incompetence has now and again killed.

John Willock, of erskine in Renfrewshire, died in December 2009 of septicaemia – after NhS 24, over the telephone, had diagnosed heartburn.

IN another case, a woman was denied an ambulance; within the day, she had been airlifted to hospital by helicopter. Through 2011 and 2012, 25 potentially lifethreatening complaints against NhS 24 were, after investigation, upheld – an average of one a month.

Tales of misdirected ambulances have been legion for years. After 75-year-old Janet Thomson collapsed, in 2007, at her home in Dunbar, east lothian, her family at once dialled 999 – and then waited, and waited…

‘My mum fell ill and we thought she had had a stroke,’ lamented her daughter. I rang 999 and explained the symptoms,’ she said. ‘They kept ringing back… and asking me to confirm the address; they did that three times.

‘When they rang us back to confirm the information we were frantic. They didn’t think to ask for basic details like our postcode.’

The ambulance duly showed up – at an identical address in Dumbarton; critics pounced on the decision, in 2003, to reduce Scotland’s call-out centres from eight to three.

At least some help was sent. On July 5, 2015, Lamara Bell and her partner, John Yuill, lay for three days in a crashed car off the M9, even though a passer-by had spotted the motor and called the police at once by the 101 number.

But the message was misplaced by the call centre. By the time the wrecked vehicle was spotted, John Yuill was dead; Miss Bell died in hospital a week later.

There was much handwringing, apologetic noise and talk of stressed call centre workers under fantastic pressure.

At month’s end, edinburgh police invited the public, by Twitter, to claim awaiting raffle prizes – by dialling 101.

‘These guys,’ said Lamara’s father quietly, ‘would be better employed in the street than sitting taking phone calls for winning raffle tickets.’