EDWARD MOUNTAIN: New First Minister agrees Raigmore needs 'significant refurbishment or a replacement'
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After nearly two years of delays the National Treatment Centre – Highland is now well on its way to completion.
I have long campaigned for the delivery of this modern facility and I was delighted to see that it is nearly ready to be open when I visited the site last week.
Many orthopaedic and ophthalmic patients are desperate for the National Treatment Centre to be fully operational, anticipating that it will provide additional capacity for treatments and begin to reduce those historically long waiting lists.
It is important to remember this facility is a ‘National’ Treatment Centre. It will not just serve Highlanders but the rest of Scotland too.
Therefore, unless Highlanders are prioritised in the first couple of years of operation, it won’t dramatically improve the increasing pressures facing Raigmore Hospital, especially for those who need highly complex orthopaedic treatments.
So, while I welcome the delivery of this long-awaited specialist facility, our attentions must now turn towards improving acute general health care provision in the Highlands.
That is why I launched my campaign for a brand-new hospital for the Highlands to replace Raigmore.
Forty years on and Raigmore is beginning to feel like an outdated hospital with services shoehorned into a limited site and limited buildings.
Upgrades and renovations to wards have extended the lifetime of Raigmore, but these are ultimately short-term fixes.
Given the advances in medicine and as health demands increase, the Highlands needs a new acute general hospital fit for the twenty-first century. Piecemeal investment here and there won’t cut it anymore.
I raised this point directly with the cabinet secretary for health and social care at the Scottish Parliament last week.
While the Scottish Government stopped short of committing itself to building a new hospital, the Cabinet Secretary said there is “no doubt” that Raigmore will require significant refurbishment or a replacement.
I also noted that the Cabinet Secretary said that he was open to NHS Highland’s input on the way forward. However, I believe all Highland communities should be brought into this process as well.
We can’t risk a situation where the Scottish Government or the Health Board makes decisions which do not have community or clinical backing, as we’ve seen with changes to maternity care provision in Caithness or Moray.
I’m under no illusion that this will likely be a complex infrastructure project that could be a decade in the making. The sooner we kickstart conversations about a new hospital, the better.
With a new First Minister now in place, I will continue to push this Scottish Government towards a making a full commitment to replacing Raigmore.
