Shetland Times Column 28th February 2025
The final stage of the Scottish Budget for 2025-26 passed as expected in the Scottish Parliament on Tuesday. Scottish Liberal Democrats voted for the budget.
During the budget negotiations of recent months, and among other commitments, my party secured extra funding including for:
- Drugs and neonatal services with a special focus on creating new services for babies born addicted to drugs;
- an additional £3.5 million so colleges can deliver the skills our economy and public services need, with new programmes focused on care and offshore wind to create a pipeline of skilled workers;
- millions more will now be spent on dedicated Long Covid, ME and Chronic Fatigue support;
- and ahead of the Infrastructure Investment Plan persuading the Scottish Government to look more closely at the project for a new Gilbert Bain Hospital.
Although the latter is not a commitment to proceed, it does indicate a line of sight towards the project getting the green light. The demands on the hospital, and staff who are working in the antiquated building, are significant.
And so too are the lack of facilities for some patients. The Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland recently visited the hospital and the report on their findings makes grim reading. For someone presenting in acute distress, before admission to a medical unit on the Mainland, there’s simply no suitable accommodation.
I welcome the report’s recommendation that a robust risk assessment of the low stimulus room and Ward 3 is undertaken to address immediate concerns not least around privacy, dignity and safety.
This report once again highlights that the Gilbert Bain Hospital is long past its sell-by date. A new hospital facility in Shetland will be able to encompass modern standards and meet the needs of patients in the 21st century.
As I like to remind colleagues, the Gilbert Bain Hospital serves not just our island population but the marine area around it. Patients can come from the oil and gas sector, fishing boats, or from the many cruise ships that we see each year.
Meanwhile, Scottish Labour proposes to reduce bureaucracy in the NHS by reducing the current 14 health boards to three ‘superboards’. It demonstrates that Scottish Labour fundamentally misunderstands island and rural communities if they think that our needs are best served by a health board that could be based as far away as Dundee.
It’s like they have learned nothing from the SNP's failures in trying to centralise the running of social care services or the erosion of local links when a single national police force was established.
NHS Shetland already works well in partnership with NHS Grampian and other boards for health treatments that are not available in the isles.
Regardless of which party proposes centralising health services, I cannot see how islanders’ needs and the services to deliver them, are best met by a ‘mainland superboard’. These were bad ideas when they were coming out of the SNP. They are bad ideas in the hands of Labour too.