Addressing the past, but listening for a better future
A view by health and wellbeing campaigner Barabel McKay, chairwoman of the volunteer Mid Argyll-based Health and Care Group
The times they are a-changing. From all directions people seem to need your views about community development, schools, roads and health.
In a recent Scottish Government consultation about the future of the health service, groups were set up by random selection in the north, south and west.
There was an online questionnaire completed by 2,500 people. That is quite a select group of participants in a population of more than five million.
We exist to make sure you have a say in the future as it affects you and your families.
Wait a minute, haven’t we been here before?
Passionate groups here have been lobbying for civilised elderly and dementia care, autism awareness, diabetic support and mental health acknowledgement. It is easier to become worn out than win.
One wonders if delay is a tactic that organisations use, instead of recognising indepth knowledge and learned experience as the invaluable professional learning tools they are.
Instead, as one of our members Leonard MacNeill put it: ‘They don’t want to be told what they are doing wrong. They only want the good news.’
The Covid experience has shown each one of us contributes to outcomes.
We need information from experts. They have to communicate adequately, but we need to be able to trust what they say.
Given recent revelations about bullying in the organisation, our health and care management does not even seem to have had the interests of its own staff at heart so how can we trust them with ours?
The hospital chaplain, Raymond Deans, expressed the pain many of us felt when he said: ‘It is hard to imagine that people are deliberately doing bad things.’
To go forward, constraints from the past have to be addressed.
We call on the Health and Social Care Partnership to have the courage to admit it is a system failure.
The chairwoman of a former health board set the precedent.
She heard the story of an injustice for which she was not personally responsible but stood up and said ‘Mea Culpa’.
The health and care group aims to represent the views of service users and their families.
Email Barabel McKay - barabelmck@gmail.com - for more information.