VIDEO: Caithness group quits healthcare task force
Relations break down between Caithness campaigners and the NHS.
Last updated 3rd May 2017
Caithness campaigners have dramatically quit a community group set up to improve the healthcare and safety of Wick hospital's patients.
ABOVE: MFR News reader John Callan presents the 1pm bulletin on MFR2 and brings you this report by MFR News reporter Bryan Rutherford.
The Caithness Maternity and Gynaecology Group (CMGG), which is a partnership between community councils and local groups, NHS Highland, and the Scottish Ambulance Service, was set up after the health board's decision to downgrade Caithness General's maternity unit.
It means that mums and babies being looked after by the midwives-only unit, who need specialist doctors, face a 100-mile ambulance journey up the A9 to Raigmore Hospital in Inverness.
That would include pregnant women with birthing complications, or any first-time mum.
BELOW: Last year this Caithness mum told MFR News what a long ambulance journey was like...
"It's a very strong, healthy group that will certainly carry on" Dr Alison Brooks, CMGG
Dr Alison Brooks says she's "surprised" that the pressure group Caithness Health Action Team (CHAT) has quit her group, the CMGG.
She told MFR News: "The group was set up at the request of CHAT.
"I was very optimistic. There is excellent accommodation now being made available in Inverness, and more still being processed; provision of extra funding for an extra ambulance up here to help with transport issues; and there's been a liaison officer appointed to make sure that when parents do go down to Raigmore there is someone who they can actually speak to, to make sure their accommodation is taken care of.
"There didn't seem to be the impression that CHAT were looking for a fight, so it's surprising to me that CHAT have withdrawn from the group."
"We still have lots of things to achieve, and it's a very strong, healthy group that will certainly carry on."
"We all feel really defeated when we come out. We don't feel it's helping things" KIRSTEEN CAMPBELL, CHAT
Vice Chair of CHAT, Kirsteen Campbell, has vowed to continued campaigning for health services to be fully returned to the hospital in Wick.
Kirsteen added: "We have attended three of these meetings, and we just feel that they're going nowhere.
"We all feel really defeated when we come out. We don't feel it's helping things.
"To be brutally honest, everything that they're discussing should have been sorted before any downgrading took place.
"There are still a lot of questions which have not been answered - a lot of safety questions, which just seem to be dodged time and time again."
BELOW: Last year MFR News spoke to NHS Highland's medical director as mums were left in tears at the decision to downgrade their maternity unit...