Meeting of the Parliament 22 December 2022
I am grateful, Deputy Presiding Officer.
I agree wholeheartedly with what Richard Lochhead said. That laser focus must come from the health board, it must come from NHS Grampian, and it must—and, I hope, will—come from the Scottish Government and all the authorities involved. However, I have fears because, as Richard Lochhead knows as well as I do, we have had campaigns to recruit people to Moray before—in education—and they have been successful for a period and then the campaigns have dwindled away. When people come to Moray, they never want to leave, but the issue is getting them there in the first place.
A concern that I have with the model 6 report is that there is nothing new in it. We are speaking about the need to attract significant numbers of staff, and I am not hearing much new from the health board about how it will achieve that, but I hope that that will change going forward.
The other area that I want to speak about is caesarean sections. The health secretary said—last year, I think—that he wanted to see a rapid reintroduction of elective caesarean sections, yet the report tells us that, under the model 6 plans, it will be more than two years until those elective C-sections will be introduced. Why, when the health secretary was very hopefully and enthusiastically saying that we could see a rapid reintroduction of elective caesarean sections over a year ago, are we now being told that it will be several more years before that happens?
The other area that I want to focus on is model 6, which is the ultimate destination. We want to get there very quickly, but it is underpinned by model 4 in NHS Grampian. Model 4 is seeing more Moray mums giving birth in Inverness, but I think that that is a red herring. As my motion says, I want to totally separate model 4 from model 6. Model 4 is “fundamentally flawed”, fraught with “patient safety concerns” and littered with
“factual errors and baseless assumptions”,
and it “should be rejected”. The health secretary will note that those are not my words but the words of clinicians at Raigmore hospital, which is where model 4 suggests that more Moray mums should go to give birth.
Therefore, why are we still, on the basis of that proposal from NHS Grampian, suggesting that model 6, which will come years down the line, must be underpinned by model 4? Senior clinicians are advising that model 4 should be abandoned, yet it still hangs over model 6. More shockingly, when, just a week ago, the NHS board discussed that proposal and all the factors of model 4 that underpin its plan for model 6, the clinicians’ concerns were mentioned not once. At the health board meeting, there was not a single reference to the concerns that are being raised by clinicians. That is shocking. It is unacceptable on the part of the board, and I do not know why it is not addressing those issues.
On Tuesday, I spoke to one of the clinicians at Raigmore hospital. He told me that, behind the scenes, no one is proposing anything that would make model 4 deliverable in the short or medium term. Local campaigners are telling us the exact same thing. Keep MUM has said there is “no evidence” to explain
“how model 4 leads to model 6.”