Quote Originally Posted by Oddquine View Post
They weren't actually banned, you know...........they were simply not invited to the meeting, because it was not a public meeting, but one to ascertain the situation within NHS Highland regarding CGH. The time for a public meeting would have been if, after that private meeting, the intentions of NHS Highland had been to permanently downgrade CGH surgical capacity or whatever. Government ministers undertake private meetings all the time.and then inform the press of what was discussed and any decisions made..and I suspect that was the intentions of the Councillors. Do people really expect to attend all meetings in which their councillors' participate, regardless of the reason for the meeting? After all, if the meeting was secret, they'd not have tweeted/put on FB that it was happening. Going by some comments on this thread, the meeting would not have been disrupted........as it would never have got past the temporary "no surgical cover over evenings and weekends" forced on NHS Highland by recruitment problems.

To be fair, you do kinda need a consultant anaesthetist if you have a surgical facility...and the BMJ jobs does have an advert for one for Wick....which rather shows that they do not intend to downgrade the surgical side.

I prefer the word punters to the term stakeholders, but they mean the same.....sorry if you don't like it. I have no problem with being thought of as a punter..after all, it's just a colloquial term for a customer(or in Australia, a voter).......as opposed to the politically correct stakeholder.....or the really irritating "client".

You still have emergency surgery "on demand"......just not in the place you would all like to have it. After all, that is why the Air Ambulance exists, because of the fact that hospitals in sparsely populated rural areas cannot justify, cost-wise, particularly in the current economic climate, a full hospital facility. The main problem with being in a hospital out of your own local area is difficulty for visitors in getting there....not in the patient getting there....as I found when I was in CGH.

You don't have to live North of Aberdeen to have to go to Aberdeen for surgery, and you don't have to live North of Inverness to have to travel for treatment, depending on the speciality needed. Heck, I had to spend a month in Inverness a decade or three ago just to have three simple tests, despite there being two local hospitals within 12 miles.....and the cost and scope of health services and expectations as to treatment entitlement has increased exponentially since then.

Living in a rural community has its drawbacks as well as its benefits. If you go by the NHS Highland Workforce plan for 2104-2015,
http://www.nhshighland.scot.nhs.uk/Meetings/BoardsMeetings/Documents/Board Meeting 12 August 2014/4.3 Workforce Plan 2014-15.pdf
punters in Highland live longer than the Scottish average, and have less "premature" deaths, so more live beyond the age of 75.....but that in itself brings pressures on health services, with the percentage of over 65s in Highland being 2% higher than in Scotland as a whole. It does give some idea of the problems faced by the Health Board regarding recruitment..though I'm not convinced that there is a lot they can do to attract permanent staff.
Oddquine there are so many inaccuracies and false assumptions in your post starting with the very first sentence that, frankly, I cannot muster enough energy to reply. I hope that should you be in Caithness soon, and need an immediate and life-saving emergency operation out of hours, that there will be someone on duty locally (highly unlikely) to try and save your life. Now I'm going to sit down in front of the TV and watch The Voice ( something that our political representatives and NHS Highland don't like us to have just now!).