Consultation

When groups such as communities are faced with major change brought about by the actions of government or business, they should be consulted. The trouble is that there is an art to running a consultation exercise: it takes both the right personalities to conduct it, and training.

The consultation exercise with West Ardnamurchan carried out by NHS Highland and the Scottish Ambulance Service failed miserably to achieve its end - to institute change with the support of the community. The people who ran it made a mess of it.

This failure was acknowledged yesterday by the person who is ultimately responsible for Scotland's NHS - Nicola Sturgeon, Cabinet Secretary for Health & Wellbeing. It was a generous apology (see notes from the meeting, here), and will go a long way towards restoring West Ardnamurchan's confidence in a service in which, until the consultation turned into a dispute, the community had great faith.

The structures which NHS Highland, the SAS and our local doctors' practice will now start to put in place won't be anything like what we had. They will be new, untried, and are bound to have faults. It is for us as a community to put behind us the problems of the last fourteen months and work with NHS officials to achieve a result which is as good, if not better, than what we had before.

The great thing about the community of West Ardnamurchan is that it fights a mean fight when it knows it has been wronged, but it is also famous for working together once it has a goal to achieve - the point Davie Ferguson made in his presentation, when he used the examples of the ferry and the lighthouse as major projects which the community delivered.

We have many people to thank for helping us to see Ms Sturgeon: our MSPs, particularly Mary Scanlon, our friends in the press, and our many friends across this country, the UK, and overseas who wrote and emailed their support. It won't be possible to thank all of them in person - but they know who they are.

One thing is very important - Nicola Sturgeon's promise that she will be watching what happens here, and will come down, in due course, to talk to us and make sure we're happy.

Photos thanks to Trevor Potts. Top: Rosie, Jac and May McNicol with whisky and prawns. Second, our representatives who met Ms Sturgeon: Jac, Rosie, Davie & Jessie. Third: yesterday's demonstration outside the Scottish Parliament. Bottom: John Chapple.