Process shows lack of care

Sir, – Willie Rennie is right to emphasise the fact that staffing shortages at St Andrews Hospital were not the sole or overriding reason for the sudden and continued closure of the overnight out-of-hours service in April (“Don’t use shortage of staff as excuse to cut GP cover, MSP warns,” Courier, December 7).

Much worse staff shortages at the other OOH centres were to blame, and the thinking was that cutting demand (the number of centres looking for staff) in one part of Fife would up supply (the number of staff willing to work) in the rest of Fife.

This might have looked plausible to a desk-bound manager in Glenrothes, but it ignored local factors.

A number of doctors who worked in St Andrews were not willing to add two hours travel time to night shifts at Kirkcaldy or Dunfermline and have therefore not swelled the ranks of available OOH staff.

It also ignored the bond to their patients and community hospitals which motivates some GPs to keep their local OOH service going.

Indeed, several GPs who had been working in the midnight OOH service in St Andrews have subsequently trained for and transferred to the OOH service in Dundee, and so are now wholly lost to Fife.

This means that re-opening the midnight OOH service will be that much harder, as will keeping open the rest of the OOH service which Fife Health and Social Care Partnership also wants to close.

An emergency, contingency closure of part of a service occurred without consultation and made keeping the whole service open less feasible. Then the permanent closure of the whole service was proposed on the grounds that keeping it open wasn’t feasible so it couldn’t feature as an option in the statutory consultation.

Anyone smell a rat here, or just sheer incompetence?

James Glen.

Dreel House, Pittenweem.