Yesterday's announcement that free car parking is to return to most Scottish hospitals will come as a welcome relieve to most patients, their families and members of staff at affected hospitals who had to pay to get to work. The three exceptions are the PFI initiative funded hospitals the Edinburgh and Glasgow Royal Infirmaries and Ninewalls in Glasgow.
So for West Lothian residents that fact that some of the services removed from St. John's at Livingston in 2004 would now have free parking and local access if not removed to the ERI adds to the discord of services being spread across the Lothian Health Board. The same must also be true of patients who get referred to the GRI or Ninewalls.
Nicola Sturgeon is quite right that "Chief among [the founding principles] is that the NHS should be free at the point of delivery and...this should apply whether one comes to hospital as a patient, visitor or a member of staff." What we need now is to find a way to overcome the disparage in parking regulations dependent on where your treatment is available within a health board. Your fine if you will get treated at St. John's, the Western General or the Royal Hospital for Sick Children but if you have long term care requirements that can only be meet at the ERI, PFI contracts are going to cost you and your visitors.
Showing posts with label St. John's Hospital. Show all posts
Showing posts with label St. John's Hospital. Show all posts
Wednesday, 3 September 2008
Friday, 25 April 2008
Constance Tries to Calm Storm
The letters page of the West Lothian Courier in recent has been red hot with insults and retorts over just where blame should be shunted regarding St. John's hospital. Some of the worse had come from Labour councillors and Labour MSP Mary Mulligan. Mary had been a junior Health Minister up at Holyrood at the time that acute emergency services were downgraded at St John's. She subsequently resigned her post to help fight for the hospital.
No at the time there were a series of public meetings. I attended one at Bathgate which occurred shortly after Mary's resignation as did Fiona Hyslop. At the end of that meeting all three parties agreed that the case for St. Johns was beyond politics and there was a verbal agreement to work together on this for the sake of the community in West Lothian.
However, in the lead up to last May's election it was Labour who broke ranks first and started to use the hospital provision as their charion of 'virtue'. The mudslinging in the press has made for poor and sad reading as the public figures seem constantly to seek to want to lay blame rather than propose solutions. Step forward Livingston's SNP MSP Angela Constance in this week's paper. She may have 8 years less experience as an MSP than Mary Mulligan but she showed true character in not getting involved in the custard pie fight, merely castigating those responsible for the damage they were inflicting on the whole stop the downgrade movement across the county. She went on to say the process is long and tough, something we all knew from day one but which Labour want to ignore, and outlined what movement had started.
So now that I've praised the SNP MSP from one half of West Lothian and the Labour MP from the other half all in the same week I think I'll need to lie down, if I'm not put down first that is.
No at the time there were a series of public meetings. I attended one at Bathgate which occurred shortly after Mary's resignation as did Fiona Hyslop. At the end of that meeting all three parties agreed that the case for St. Johns was beyond politics and there was a verbal agreement to work together on this for the sake of the community in West Lothian.
However, in the lead up to last May's election it was Labour who broke ranks first and started to use the hospital provision as their charion of 'virtue'. The mudslinging in the press has made for poor and sad reading as the public figures seem constantly to seek to want to lay blame rather than propose solutions. Step forward Livingston's SNP MSP Angela Constance in this week's paper. She may have 8 years less experience as an MSP than Mary Mulligan but she showed true character in not getting involved in the custard pie fight, merely castigating those responsible for the damage they were inflicting on the whole stop the downgrade movement across the county. She went on to say the process is long and tough, something we all knew from day one but which Labour want to ignore, and outlined what movement had started.
So now that I've praised the SNP MSP from one half of West Lothian and the Labour MP from the other half all in the same week I think I'll need to lie down, if I'm not put down first that is.
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