ANGUS MACDONALD: Here’s a plan to solve Highland care crisis - ignore at your peril
A month ago, I met Bill Lobban, the convener of the Highland Council following my resignation as a councillor. I told him that in my opinion the biggest threat to the wellbeing of those who lived in the Highlands was the care sector.
We spoke about the fragility of the smaller privately run care homes and the eight that had already closed across the Highlands. He agreed that it was not acceptable for residents to be moved a long way from their families, from Portree to Nairn or Inverness to Fort William.
In September 2023, I put forward a motion calling for the Highland Council to ask the Scottish Government to fully fund NHS Highland sufficiently well to do its job, with specific regard to care. I was really angry that the SNP/Independent administration voted against it.
As a Highland councillor, in April 2024, I wrote an open letter to NHS Highland chief executive Fiona Davies and Scottish health minister Neil Gray which was published in media throughout the Highlands. It pointed out that we had a crisis unfolding now, and that we needed a five-year plan to build 60-bed care homes with staff accommodation across the Highlands to cope with the bed shortage and our rapidly ageing population.
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In the spring, the 50-bed Cradlehall Care Home in Inverness closed, managers phoned Moss Park in Fort William to see if they had availability. They didn’t, and now Moss Park is closing.
Once a care home closes it is very unlikely it will reopen. Meanwhile our hospitals are filling up with ‘delayed discharges’, residents waiting to move into a care bed. The Highlands has a higher level of delayed discharges that any other area in Scotland. It costs nearly three times more to have someone in a hospital bed rather than a care home.
Why are they closing? Primarily the funding package and pay levels put forward by the Scottish Government are far too low, and smaller care homes are losing a lot of money. Secondly, the regulator Care Inspectorate (Scotland) has instituted requirements for increased bathroom sizes amongst other things. Older care homes would need millions of pounds to be demolished and rebuilt to fit the new requirements, and private companies cannot afford this.
What should be done? Mr Gray needs to understand that we have a crisis, we need to have a substantially increased funding package for smaller rural care homes, not least so that they can pay their staff properly. The Highland Council and NHS Highland must never let an existing care home close. The Care Inspectorate needs to drop its upgrade requirements, surely it’s better that we keep the care homes we have rather than have no care homes at all. Finally, we need more large care homes built in our local population centres for the inevitable future need. Here is a plan to solve our care crisis that the council, NHS and government ignore at their peril.
