I read with interest the piece on the Friends of the Birks being awarded £320,000 to initiate the revival of the cinema, but as this is taxpayers money, a couple of questions ambled into my head.  See: Aberfeldy Regeneration Award Success

How is the purchase to proceed? The Cinema is currently on the market at £230,000, as it has been for a while, so I would assume the actual worth of the building is less than its current asking price. Now that the owners knows there is a cheque for £320,000 what’s to stop them demanding all of that?

The article suggested that the total project cost could be in the order of £1.4 million. How and by when will that be raised?

Has there been any survey which states that a fully commissioned cinema in Aberfeldy would be a going concern?

We already have the Locus Centre, and the newly revamped town hall, and the new school will be available soon. Do we really need another projection venue?

Don’t get me wrong, the idea of a viable boutique cinema is a great one, but I wonder if the homework has been done to ensure that the community won’t be left with a derelict cinema in 4 years time, which has been paid for with taxpayers’ money.

What checks and balances do the Scottish Executive ask for to ensure the project is a viable one?

Alastair Irvine

Weem

Anybody could be excused for finding the out-of-hours dispute perplexing.  But it has never been more important than it is now to shine some light onto the complexities. This is because the long-running dispute is coming to a crunch point. The powers-that-be may find it harder to avoid a meaningful encounter with local opinion than they have previously – although we should not underestimate their capacity to evade.   

There are no less than six reasons why things are coming to a head.       Six Reasons

First, the campaign to restore the former GP OOH service is reinvigorated.Secondly, lawyers have been briefed to support the community.   A solicitors’ letter drafted by Michael Upton, an advocate specializing in public administration law, has been sent to Professor Tony Wells, the Chief Executive of NHS Tayside, giving him a maximum of 20 working days under Freedom of Information legislation in which to answer eleven questions on how he and the Chief Operating Officer went about constructing the annual costings for a GP out-of-hours service. The figures that they cited (£503,000/£506,000  to the community and £556,876 to the members of their Board) seem to be wildly exaggerated. 

This  sense that, in the lawyers’ phrase, the costings were manufactured “by error or invention” is confirmed by some inquiries that have been made on behalf of the community.  A second letter, invoking the 1978 NHS (Scotland) Act, has gone to Nicola Sturgeon as Cabinet Secretary for Health and Wellbeing at Holyrood. This second letter is related to the FoI request to Professor Wells. It follows on from an earlier letter that Rannoch and Tummel Community Council sent to Ms Strurgeon as long ago as 17 November last year.  The civil servant who replied  on her behalf eleven weeks later ignored both the request to her to intervene and the substance of the letter, a complaint about the costings and five other instances of irregularity. This time it will be harder for Ms Sturgeon  to ignore or sideline the solicitors’ letter.Thirdly, people from Kinloch Rannoch will be going to Forfar on 14 September to attend the annual review of NHS Tayside with a question to ask their Chief Executive and Ms  Sturgeon, who is reported to be attending. To her the question, is essence, will be:  why have you turned your backs on us when we asked you to intervene? Fourthly, there is renewed media interest and thereby a wider public understanding of what is at stake not only for Kinloch Rannoch but also for other remote rural places in the Highlands and Islands. 

Fifthly, an e-petition has been placed on the Scottish Parliament’s website, which calls for the Government to ensure that there is adequate local GP out-of-hours cover in all of Scotland’s remote rural areas. 

Sixthly, and most intriguingly, Lord Monckton has placed an ad in two successive issues of GP Magazine which is intended to break the deadlock by inviting doctors to let him have their expressions of interest in providing an out-of-hurts service in Kinloch Rannoch.

 The Crucial WeekThe crucial week begins on Monday 14 September when a number of us will be going to the NHS Tayside meeting in Forfar.  The deadline for NHS Tayside to respond to the FoI request expires the next day, 15 September.  And at the end of the week, Friday 18 September, there will be a public meeting in the village hall convened by the Community Council. This will have two purposes.  The first of these is to allow Lord  Monckton to  report to the community on the tendering process for the desired – but not yet existent – GP OOH post. So far the indications are that there are several serious candidates and that it t might cost each year about a quarter of the over half a million pounds that the NHS Tayside officials reported to the community and to their Board members. The following week there is to be a meeting of “interested parties” before the Tayside Health Board meets again on 24 September.   Misconception

There is misconception that keeps on cropping up in discussion about whether it’s really worthwhile to keep going on with the campaign after all this time with no result.  The misconception is that NHS Tayside “doesn’t have the money”.  This sounds reasonable but actually is a misconception because it is the Scottish Government that allocates the funds to support the budgets of the different health boards. And the Highland Health Board, for example, was able to fund no fewer than sixteen 24/7 practices as of last summer (the information came in a Minister’s answer to a Parliamentary question lodged by local MSP, Murdo Fraser).

So why then should Tayside Health Board not be able to fund a single medical practice here in Kinloch Rannoch just as it used to do right up to 2006? And at that time under the chairmanship of Peter Bates Tayside Health Board very much wanted to continue to fund this service.    Strange Finances But it is very sensible of local people to ask some searching questions about NHS finances. That quickly brings us to the question of the money that some (but not, repeat not, all) doctors are able to obtain by playing the system.    I am neither doctor nor  Health Board official but what I so far have been able to find out as a lay person is that there is no father bedding for those admirable doctors who still do provide round-the-clock cover in the remote places. In-hours remuneration is fairly generous so health boards do not have to pay vast additional sums to GPs to provide out-of-hours cover, who share out the duties amongst themselves.But it is a different matter when it comes to the lucrative fees that doctors can obtain by doing locums at weekends or in moonlighting for NHS24. The locums do very well for themselves (about £1000 for a weekend) but at least they provide some welcome relief to the hardworking 24/7 doctors.  But it is a different matter with NHS24 – the service that has proved so inadequate in Kinloch Rannoch. True, there has been a marginal improvement in the shift system but, really, it is not fit for purpose. It has come to be regarded, by no less a body than the British Medical Association,  as being very expensive for what it is. Read a doctors’ blog, the kind where they let their hair down, and what you might find yourself reading is a denunciation of “protocolised telephone consultations”.  This is  medical jargon for what so many people, at a weekend or late at night, experience as they are required to explain over the phone to one person after another what it is that ails them, to self-diagnose.As I read the blogs my heart warmed to these indignant doctors who know that this is wrong and who share the same values as their predecessors who over a  hundred years or so would drive out in pony and trap or car to diagnose and treat their patients whatever the hour.   Dick Barbor-Might