Hansard

Our 13th and final petition is PE1591, by Catriona MacDonald, on behalf of SOS-NHS, on the major redesign of healthcare services in Skye, Lochalsh and South-west Ross. I have to say that, based on the amount of information that the campaigners brought to us, I do not think that the responses that we got in any way addressed the entirety of the concerns that were raised. There is a bit of work that still has to be done around the petition. There is a lot of concern about a decision having been made when the consultation appears to have been so unsatisfactory. I am not saying that we as a committee have to agree this morning on what to do to raise that issue, but I do not think that we can close the petition. There is still life in it. We could put it in the legacy paper, to ask the next committee to continue looking into the matter, because lessons have to be learned. Even if we cannot get the decision overturned, there must be some understanding of why there were so many concerns about how the consultation resulted in the decision that was made and left so many people in the community affected by and dissatisfied with that decision. It is not possible simply to say, “Well, that’s the end of that. We didn’t get the questions answered.” A lot of those questions remain unanswered, and there is not much that we can do with the petition in a fortnight, but that is not to say that the Public Petitions Committee in the next session could not look at the matter again and consider whether more work could be done. It could even pass it to the next health committee, if that is ultimately what it wants to do, so that there could be some consideration of how that consultation was conducted. A lot of the controversy around decisions made by health boards is not so much about the decisions themselves but about how the consultations have arrived at those decisions. We heard that with one of the other petitions on which we asked health boards to give evidence. They consulted and then just completely ignored the 80 per cent of the public who had responded and took the side of the minority. That kind of thing leaves people wondering about the point of consulting in the first place. There is a bigger picture that is not being addressed in the responses that we got. Do members agree with that?