These local comforting Hospitals are still to communities

Our local hospital has been in the news lately after almost a century of going about its business more or less unnoticed. On Thursday, NHS Tayside announced it would reopen, after being closed to new admissions the week before when a patient tested positive for the coronavirus.

For some of my colleagues the first reaction was surprise that our town – population 4,000 and just a 10-minute ambulance ride to Perth Royal Infirmary – still had a hospital.

It’s a pretty, B-listed, red stone building, opened in 1926 thanks to the benevolence of a local toff, and now provides mainly rehab and palliative care.

It’s one of these places communities cherish but don’t want to shout about too loudly in case the bean counters and centralisers remember it’s there and start looking at bottom lines and economies of scale.

Black humorists joke about patients leaving by the back door. And it’s true that generations of residents from the town and surrounding area have spent their last days here – close to their loved ones, lulled by familiar voices, breathing the air that sustained them throughout their lives.

Local families feel a sentimental connection to a place like that and the memories it evokes, and it’s a bold finance director that can put a price on that kind of care.

So when I saw the people in Fife rising up in defence of their own community hospitals this week, I understood a little of how they felt.

On Tuesday, we reported on a peaceful, but heartfelt, protest outside Randolph Wemyss Memorial Hospital in Buckhaven.

The demonstration was called after Fife Health and Social Care Partnership confirmed it was closing the 10-bed Wellesley Unit there, without any public consultation. The unit provides end-of-life care to patients such as 85-year-old Rae Henderson, whose daughter Sally Kemp told us of her “utter devastation” at the move.

Health bosses say they can no longer guarantee patient safety since a local GP practice informed them it was unable to continue delivering the service due to the added pressures brought on by Covid-19. The intention, they have insisted, is to look after patients at home, in care homes, or in community hospitals elsewhere but thousands of people have pledged their support to a growing campaign seeking a rethink and a halt to what they see as the erosion of local health services.

Unions fear the loss of the Wellesley

Unit is the thin end of a wedge, and that services elsewhere are now under threat. Already, attention has turned to the nine-bed hospice at Queen Margaret Hospital at Dunfermline, which closed at the start of the pandemic in order to safeguard patients. Here the aim is to resume services as soon as it is safe to do so, say health chiefs, but no timescale has been set and, given the developments elsewhere, it’s no surprise that people are becoming a little nervy about the centre’s long-term future.

Fife is not alone in facing challenges to how it cares for people safely and affordably and authorities everywhere may well have tricky obstacles to overcome as we chart a course towards a post-pandemic world.

The NHS is an evolving entity, which must always seek out new and more efficient ways of providing care to a growing and ageing population, but we lose these local services at our peril.

Most of us, given a choice, would live out our days in our own homes. For many, that’s simply not possible

and these community hospitals and hospices provide a place where people can die in peace and dignity, in the care of people who know them and will lend a hand to their loved ones after they are gone. They may be a remnant of another era, but they are one that’s worth fighting for.

Mother Nature at work

At the start of May, in the wake of the devastating Errol reed bed fires, I predicted we may never know how they started. This week, top fire officials admitted just that.

It prompted our photographer Steve Brown — whose dramatic images of the fire brought the devastation home to us — to revisit the site.

Now, not to come across all Mystic Morag but I had also surmised it would not take long for Mother Nature to reassert herself on the banks of the Tay.

Sure enough, we found that what had been a blackened scrubland is returning to something close to its former splendour.

Before long, we should be seeing the return of the vast array of plants, birds and animals that made such a wonderful natural habitat — it’s getting “back to normal”, if you will.

We’re watching the reed beds force their way back after crushing adversity and not for the first time, can take inspiration from the natural world.

Pictures: Steve Brown. Clockwise, from top left: A demonstration against the planned closure of the Wellesley Unit at Randolph Wemyss Memorial Hospital in Buckhaven; a helicopter dumps water on to the fire which broke out at the Tay reed beds, near Errol, in April; the scene today, with the reed beds returning to something close to their former splendour. Inset: Sally Kemp, from Buckhaven, whose mother has been cared for at the Wellesley Unit.