Health chiefs shelve worst of the cuts
ARGYLL’S council-run care homes, day care and learning disability centres were spared last week, at least until May, when health bosses will meet again to decide how to save £13 million in this year’s budget.
Earlier Scotland’s health minister Shona Robison urged them to drop proposals for 400 job cuts and ‘terrifying’ closures – including a leaked, secret plan to shut Eadar Glinn, Tigh a Rhuda and Gortanvogie care homes – until they engaged ‘fully and transparently’ with local people.
Argyll and Bute MSP Michael Russell called on the Health and Social Care Partnership (HSCP), and governing Integrated Joint Board (IJB) to change. He said: ‘They never even mentioned the impending financial crisis, still less the drastic list of cuts.’
He accused it of ‘hiding the true situation’ with a plan to discuss the full cuts in private, excluding the public at its open meeting to decide what savings to adopt on Wednesday March 28.
Officials from Argyll and Bute’s HSCP and IJB began their morning at Kilmory with a heated meeting behind closed doors, before they faced the public in the afternoon.
IJB chairman Robin Creelman began with an unconditional apology ‘for the way that played out in the press. There is no intention to do anything hidden or in secret, as was implied. It was our fault. Poor communication’.
Mr Creelman introduced a motion, seconded by IJB vice chairman Councillor Kieron Green, removing the HSCP’s plans to cut learning disability centres and 56 jobs, older people day centres and 14 jobs and the closure of the Knapdale dementia ward in Lochgilphead’s Mid Argyll Hospital. It also retreated from a plan to outsource home care services in Mid Argyll, Kintyre, Islay, Colonsay, Mull, Iona, Tiree and Coll, affecting 96 posts.
The motion also withdrew ‘a separate report outlining potential further service changes’ – understood to include a leaked plan to close all council-run care homes in Argyll and Bute risking 275 redundancies – because they ‘would not have been in line with the strategic plan’.
It also requested officers ‘develop alternative savings proposals to be brought back to the IJB in May 2018’.
The motion was unanimously passed. However, in it the HSCP did agree ‘to reduce payments to commissioned service providers’, ‘review hours worked by advanced nurse practitioners [in] Oban’, reduce sleepovers and withdraw meals on wheels and lunch clubs except in remote areas where there were no alternatives.
Afterwards, councillors Douglas Philand and Donald Kelly of Argyll First said they would temporarily take down their petition after it attracted 1,340 signatures online, and 2,000 more on paper around Campbeltown, Tarbert and Lochgilphead.
Tarbert resident Wilma Watts told The Oban Times: ‘The leaked documents were the equivalent of a nuclear bomb. [The IJB] saw the reaction and the proposals were withdrawn. But the threat has not been withdrawn.
‘If the leaked documents had not happened, the public would not have turned up and it would have been passed. No consultation. Where do these elderly people go? I thought it was shocking.’
Christina West, the HSCP’s chief officer, said: ‘The IJB was presented with some very difficult decisions to take and were faced with a dilemma with conflicting priorities of providing quality care, meeting performance targets and expectations and delivering financial balance.
‘This included separate consideration of service proposals that are outwith the delivery of our strategic plan. I am also aware the speculation over the proposals has been unsettling for our staff, communities and stakeholders and I regret the upset, concern and anxiety that this has caused.’