A retired GP has hit out at a long serving local unionist politician.
Jamie Stone, Member of Parliament for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross, has recently been in the press demanding that First Minister John Swinney comes to the area and drives the A9 as a way of experiencing what pregnant mothers have to undergo as they travel from Wick to Inverness to give birth.
But retired GP Elizabeth Scargill has hit out at the Tain-based politico, who was previously a Highland councillor and MSP before he jumped south of the border to Westminster.
“James Stone continues to fuel his populist flames with inappropriate and unrealistic rhetoric,” said Scargill.
“Having recently suffered a complex fracture of my femur and living in his constituency on the A9, dualling the A9 would not have saved my life nor improved the care I received.
“The wonderful NHS Highland doctors who attended with paramedics did.
“Whilst I am under no illusion that improvements are always possible, as a retired GP with qualifications in Obstetrics and Gynecology, unlike Mr Stone, I feel able to evaluate the service objectively.
“Maternity services in Caithness are a good example.
“At present it is a midwife-led service, just as it has always been in places like Lochinver or Skye and Lochalsh.
“But, some in Caithness want a Consultant-led service in Caithness with no understanding of what that means or what it would actually entail.
“Very few Consultants Obstetricians would want to work somewhere where their years of training and skills development will rarely be needed.
“But even if we could find consultants willing to work there, we would need at least three to cover out-of-hours and annual/study leave.
“And even that would not be enough as we would also need three anaesthetists and three paediatricians with neonatal experience.
“All this for a community of 25-30,000 and probably no more than two deliveries a week on average.
“Jamie Stone is exploiting people.
“Patients on the N&W Coast travel to Raigmore without making the protests we see from Caithness because they have been well informed that this is the safest, most efficient option and they have not been given lots of false information and not been used by manipulative politicians.
“Incidentally any parent who tells you proudly that they transported their baby on the back seat of a car in a carrycot should not be lecturing us on health and safety on the road!
“We should be concentrating on recruitment and retention of staff, support for our GPs & their teams, including midwives, paramedics, home carers etc.
“A helicopter would mean that no one would have to travel the A9 in an emergency situation.
“I agree that centralisation is not sensitive to local needs but needs can be met by a midwife-led service with GP input.
“As a GP, I qualified and delivered babies myself and found it the most wonderful experience for all involved.
“What is perhaps less surprising is that our Liberal Democrat MP fails to mention that one of the greatest risk factors for mothers in Caithness is poverty, something which as the Midwives of Austerity, his party hold genuine culpability for.
“Caithness has twice the proportion of the maternity population living in the most deprived quintile than that of the Highland Region overall, 21% versus 10%.
“Years of Westminster policies such as the rape clause, the bedroom tax and cuts to everything except MPs’ bar bills, have exacerbated and maintained that problem.
“We would not have had a Tory government without the Liberal Democrats.
“We would not have had grinding poverty worsened without the Liberal Democrats and we would not have needed the SNP to spend millions and billions of pounds mitigating these disasters without the Liberal Democrats.
“And whilst Jamie Stone talks about things he knows he will never have to deliver on because his party will always be in opposition, the SNP has to deliver while he lisps his solution-free platitudes and blames everyone else for not solving it.
“So whilst he Stone is off playing Gepetto to David Green’s Pinochio, I don’t believe that it is possible to talk ‘until blue in the face’, as Mr Green alleges, even when talking such nonsense as our Westminster representative, he might like to know that cyanosis is a genuine medical condition, which is achievable by swallowing objects, such as a Stone.
“I feel like voters have had to swallow enough from Mr Stone over the 30 years on the public teat and there’ll be more of that to come if he gets his way and tugs David’s strings for Holyrood in 2026.
“Incidentally, if Jamie or David is ever unfortunate enough to ever suffer from this condition, I pray for him that it will be in Scotland and not in England.
“Whilst our NHS is undoubtedly under pressure, we are far safer and better cared for here than he would be there.”
