Month: April 2023

Humzah Yousaf announces another £1 million to tackle health inequalities

First Minister Humzah Yousaf has announced additional support for general practices in most deprived areas. People living in some of Scotland’s most deprived communities will benefit from an additional £1 million of funding to help tackle health inequalities.

The Inclusion Health Action in General Practice programme provides targeted funding for support to patients whose social circumstances have a negative impact on their health.

The funding is allocated directly to practices which are in the NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde Health Board area and feature on the list of 100 most deprived practices in Scotland.

First Minister Humza Yousaf made the announcement as he visited the New Gorbals Health Centre in Glasgow.

The First Minister said: “General practice is at the heart of our communities and is uniquely placed to deliver the care and support needed by patients who experience health inequalities.

“Of the one hundred poorest practices in the whole of Scotland, shockingly 81 currently sit within the Greater Glasgow and Clyde Health Board area – a statistic I am determined to change.

“This additional funding of £1 million will build on the foundations of previous funding. At a time when the cost of living crisis is widening health inequalities, this is an important step that supports our commitments to prevention and early intervention with patients at highest risk of poor health.”

Lorna Kelly, Chair of the Primary Care Health Inequalities Development Group said: “The NHS needs to be at its best where it is needed the most, or health inequalities will continue to worsen.

“This additional resource to general practices serving the most deprived communities in Scotland is therefore very welcome.”

Butlin’s launch £2.5 million SKYPARK

  • Butlin’s officially opens SKYPARK – a brand new inclusive playground – at its Skegness resort
  • New research reveals three quarters of UK parents believe more should be done to support children with additional needs
  • Almost half (44%) of parents say they’ve had to cut back on play opportunities for their children in the last 12 months due to financial concerns

A brand-new £2.5M playground, Butlin’s SKYPARK has opened today at the home of entertainment’s Skegness resort – designed specifically so children of all abilities can play together, shoulder to shoulder.

The opening comes as new national research reveals the majority of parents believe children with additional needs do not receive sufficient support, with three quarters (75%) saying more should be done in this area.

What’s more, the research found that almost half of parents (44%) have had to cut back on play opportunities for their children in the last 12 months due to financial concerns. With parents on average spending £100 (£94.31) per month on paid for activities, such as assault courses and soft play. 

Despite UK parents cutting back on paid for activities, they unveiled that the top skills they feel their children develop through socialising and playing with others include; confidence (55%), sharing (51%), cooperation (46%), patience (42%) and respect (41%).

The state-of-the-art playground is equipped with a wheelchair-accessible trampoline and roundabout, sit-up swings for support and sociability, and wheelchair-friendly walkways and ramps, to ensure no child is left on the side lines.

Butlin’s SKYPARK further features four epic climbing towers with the tallest standing at 14 metres high, offering an incredible panoramic sea view.

The site, at Butlin’s Skegness resort, is also home to the UK’s longest interactive seesaw, at an impressive 24 metres long, children and adults can work together to generate enough energy to light up the area.

Alongside the park sits the Butlin’s SKYPARK Café, where the adults can relax and keep an eye on the children enjoying themselves.

Featuring an array of indoor and outdoor seating, with a selection of hot and cold drinks and snacks, the café also has a specially curated music playlist, set at an appropriate volume setting and to a calming low beat with inclusivity in mind. 

Jon Hendry-Pickup, CEO at Butlin’s, said: “As the home of entertainment, we’re really proud to be able to offer a playground that’s designed to be truly inclusive for all families – with Butlin’s SKYPARK included in the price of a break.

“Launching Butlin’s SKYPARK is an incredibly proud moment for us as a business and it is the first of many exciting investments we’re making across our three resorts in the next few years.

“Our new playground provides a safe, stimulating place for children of all abilities to play together. We can’t wait to see families enjoying our incredible new playground this Easter and beyond.”

To see more about Butlin’s SKYPARK, including full information on the different zones and key features, please head to: www.butlins.com/discover-butlins/things-to-do/skypark

Council organises community cleanup in West Pilton

LAST week was a week of community action in West Pilton, where the city council’s housing team worked with commercial partners, tenants and local school children to spring clean estates.

After a build up of flytipping and littering, it was time to call in the skips and work together to help the community tackle problem area hot spots.

These before and after photos and CEC’s video of the clear up show the huge amount of hard work which was involved. Skips were collected over four days at West Pilton Crossway, Ferry Road Drive, West Pilton Park and Ferry Road Avenue.

In response to help from little litter pickers from local schools, 1,000 Easter eggs were shared out through West Pilton catchment schools, generously donated by ISS UK cleaning services and idverde UK grounds maintenance.

Councillor Jane Meagher, Housing, Homelessness and Fair Work Convener, said: “It really has been a massive clean-up operation and I’d like to thank everybody who pitched in. “

“A lot of hard work has been put in by many different people and a massive difference has been made. A lot of the rubbish was sadly a result of flytipping, which is always disappointing. It has been an issue in the area for some time and I think a lot of people will appreciate the efforts which have been made to sort it out. Let’s hope the estate can stay cleaner and greener for some time.”

Designed to promote community spirit and help commercial partners of the council to add financial and social value that benefit local people, the events were coordinated by CEC’s housing operations team supported by colleagues from waste and cleansing and schools.

The council would like to thank the following organisations for giving up their valuable time and resources to help us with waste collection, weeding, litter picking and equipment to help ensure a week of success:

ABM UK cleaning services

Belac Group Ltd specialist construction

Biffa PLC waste management

Changeworks energy efficiency 

Idverde UK grounds maintenance

ISS UK cleaning services

NWH Group Trade Waste Collection & Recycling Services

Pertemps Edinburgh jobs

Ross Quality Control Ltd building supervisors

ISS UK cleaning services

Idverde UK grounds maintenance

Multi service exercise to train new staff to deal with road accidents

The Scottish Ambulance Service, Scottish Fire and Rescue Service and Police Scotland held a training exercise in the Borders recently for students and new recruits to practice responding to a road traffic collision (RTC).

The Scottish Ambulance Service, Scottish Fire and Rescue Service and Police Scotland held a training exercise in the Borders recently for students and new recruits to practice responding to a road traffic collision (RTC).

The exercise was held at Galashiels Fire Station on the 7th March and Hawick Fire Station on Tuesday the 14th March , with the aim of teaching participants  from each emergency service how to deal with a collision.

The mock exercise – held on the two nights with different groups of attendees – involved a two vehicle, high-speed, head-on collision, and saw different levels of responses.

Paramedic Lee Myers, SAS’s lead for the exercise, said: “This training has been designed around student and new recruit development, as we continue to welcome new staff into the Service.

“The exercise involved dealing with a serious RTC, with Police Scotland, the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service attending alongside the Scottish Ambulance Service.

“The participants from all the services did a fantastic job dealing with the incident which included casualties with potentially serious injuries.  We also had approximately 20 Queen Margaret University student paramedics attend on the night and crews dealing with a traumatic cardiac arrest, a roof off extrication, patients being fully immobilised, and much, much more.  

“The three services share an excellent working relationship and this has been a great opportunity to work on improving communication and joint agency working.   I would like to say a huge thank you to all involved for making this training exercise such a success.”

Area Commander Hilary Sangster is the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service’s Local Senior Officer for Midlothian, East Lothian and Scottish Borders.

She said: “Exercises such as this are important and hugely worthwhile for our firefighters to train to protect our communities alongside emergency service colleagues in a unique and dynamic environment – and also follow several months of planning.

“I would also like to take this opportunity to thank all those involved and especially Station Commanders Grant Fraser and Roy Bradley, and our partners for their continued commitment to this multi-agency training.”

‘Just Like You’: Mercat Tours launches new Witches Tour

Mercat Tours has announced a brand-new history tour Witches; Trial and Truth launching this Easter weekend, Saturday 8 April, and running every weekend. Members of the team gathered at Edinburgh Castle Esplanade to visit the very place where the accused were once tried and executed.

Delving into injustices of the past and telling the truth about the witch craze which gripped Edinburgh, the adult-only tour aims to shed light on this dark period of paranoia and persecution. Promising to bring an immersive experience, the tour will transport visitors back to the past and separate facts from commonly held myths.

Starting at Mercat Cross visitors will learn when Scotland was ruled by an irrational king and his obsession with the dark arts. Mercat Tours’ five-star, award-winning Storytellers will walk visitors back two centuries as they follow the accused’s tragic last steps through the cobbled streets of Edinburgh’s Old Town and its centuries-old closes to uncover the historic tales before finishing at Edinburgh Castle Esplanade. 

As part of the tour launch, Mercat Tours have introduced a campaign highlighting that Edinburgh’s ‘witches’ were really ordinary, innocent, people ‘Just Like You’.  It illustrates how the company celebrates diversity in their team and visitors by making a connection between the injustices and lack of diversity of the past vs now. 

Putting its own team members at the centre of the campaign, which is important to Mercat as an inclusive employer, it shines a spotlight on individuals who would’ve been targeted for their differences in the past.

Drawing parallels between their team today and the real stories of those who suffered reveals they were #justlikeyou ie someone who can heal such as Janet Boyman, an independent business women like Agnes Finnie, and those who speak a foreign language, to reflect modern times and a more inclusive society that exists today.

Kat Brogan, managing director at Mercat Tours said: “Inclusion and belonging is at the heart of everything we do at Mercat, its what we are valued for by the team and our visitors. It was important to reflect this through our new tour as we identify real life stories today that in the past would’ve led to something very different and considered a crime. 

“Mercat have been making connections between people and the past by giving history a damn good telling since 1985. We want visitors to make a thoughtful connection with injustices of the past and form their own thoughts about it.”

For more information and to book your tickets in advance visit:  

www.mercattours.com

NHS 24: Easter Opening Times

Important, please share 💙

It’s important to know the opening times of your GP, pharmacy and dental surgeries over the Easter weekend in case you need medical assistance.

A lot of these services will have reduced hours or be closed, so it’s best to check in advance to ensure you have access to the care you need.

Find out more at NHS inform

https://nhs24.info/servicedirectory

RCEM welcomes new Health Secretary

‘We must eliminate dangerous and unacceptable delays to patient care’

Responding to the latest Emergency Department performance figures for Scotland for February 2023 (see below) Dr John-Paul Loughrey, Vice President of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine Scotland, said: “As the data show, the start of this year has continued to be difficult in Emergency Care.

“Patients continue to face long and dangerous waits as staff continue to be stretched to their limit. Ambulance queues, poor patient flow throughout our hospitals, exit block – where patients are stuck in the system in a ‘traffic jam’ – these remain prevalent across Emergency Departments in Scotland.

“We congratulate the First Minister for Scotland, Humza Yousaf MSP, on his appointment to his new role, and we welcome Michael Matheson MSP (above) to the role of Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care.

“We hope to continue and increase our engagement with the Scottish Government to improve patient care and staff conditions in Emergency Medicine and the wider health service.

“We urge the new Cabinet Secretary to build on the constructive engagement of his predecessor and increase focus on investing in adequate and sufficient social care to discharge patients in a timely way to free up beds.

£Alongside this, we ask him to prioritise expanding acute bed capacity across Scotland and retaining existing staff. These are the short-term priorities for Emergency Care. It would be wrong to take measures to manage demand and reduce attendances on the front door – such measures do nothing to tackle the root causes of long-term problems.

“In the long-term, we urge the new Cabinet Secretary to look at workforce planning and sustained and continued funding and investment in health and social care to ensure we do not reach the troughs of performance and patient care that we saw in 2022.

“We must reduce and eliminate dangerous and unacceptable delays to patient care that we know are associated with patient harm and patient deaths. We would welcome an opportunity to meet with the new Cabinet Secretary to discuss our Five Priorities for UK Governments for #ResuscitatingEmergencyCare.”

The latest performance figures for February 2023 for Emergency Departments across Scotland show:

  • There were 95,110 attendances at major Emergency Departments
  • 66.4% of patients were seen within four-hours at major (Type 1) Emergency Departments
    • This is an increase of 1.2 percentage points from the previous month, but a decrease of 5.3 percentage points when compared with February 2022
    • 31,964 patients waited over four-hours in major Emergency Departments
  • In February 2023, 10,709 patients waited eight-hours or more in an Emergency Department
    • This is a decrease of 18% from the previous month, January 2023
    • This is the worst February on record
    • This is equal to more than one in 10 patients waiting eight-hours or more in a major Emergency Department
  • 4,751 patients waited more than 12-hours before being seen, admitted, discharged, or transferred
    • This figure has fallen by 25% from the previous month
    • This is the worst February on record

Council to trial Citizen Space initiative in Gorgie Dalry

A trial community contact project is running in Gorgie Dalry to make it easier for local people to reach the services and support that the Council offers.

Citizen Space at Tynecastle Community Wing is a test site that enables residents to access Council services in a convenient local setting.

The new trial team has been specially trained to help people there and then with Council services like ordering a new wheelie bin or informing of problems with local street lights. They can also link residents to the right community groups and other places they can get support.

If people would like help and advice with other things – such as housing, neighbourhood disputes or debt – the team will invite them for a longer discussion about how they can help.

The Council’s customer teams provide an important point of contact for residents looking to access Council services. Locality offices continue to offer an essential route for those seeking help and support.

The need to deliver more proactive services closer to people across the city is part of the Council’s 20-minute neighbourhood strategy. This will allow everyone to live well locally and meet most of their daily needs from within their own community by walking, cycling, wheeling or taking public transport.

Council Leader Cammy Day met with the team and Citizens Advice Edinburgh colleagues involved in the project on Tuesday to see their work in action.

Council Leader Cammy Day, said: “We want to make sure that everyone living in Edinburgh can easily reach the services and support that the Council offers. We’re working with our local partners and communities to plan and deliver services that meet everyone’s needs in a better way.

“Citizen Space at Tynecastle Community Wing provides exactly that – a new convenient and welcoming space that’s making it easier for people to use our services and receive advice.

“This is all part of our plan to support everyone’s wellbeing and end poverty and isolation in Edinburgh. These local community hubs will bring daily services together for everyone to help create more social and liveable communities.”

The Citizen Space is a drop-in facility for residents to use as they need it, but the team is also regularly out and about in the area to speak with local people and see how they can help. Look out for them in their 20-Minute Neighbourhood team jackets. 

New eco exhibition set to inspire a host of homes and interiors ideas

The Leith Collective launches “Furniture Reimagined” eco exhibition

Creating a home is an art form – choosing furniture can be an act of creative self-expression, but upcycling furniture can take that creativity to a whole new level. This is especially evident in a brand-new eco exhibition, Furniture Reimagined, open now in Edinburgh.

Taking place at The Leith Collective, Furniture Reimagined features the work of environmentally-conscious artists from all over Scotland, brought together by a shared vision to breathe new life into old household items. 

All manner of furniture from a range of eras features in the exhibition – from re-upholstered vintage chairs to contemporary doors turned into mirrors.

Some items needed some simple TLC to bring them back to their former glory, whilst others have been recycled, repurposed and reworked into something completely original. 

The timing of the exhibition is no coincidence. It is around this time of year that UK householders spring clean and send a host of household items straight to landfill. The artists behind this exhibition hope their work will encourage people to think twice before doing so, and keep furniture in use for longer to reduce waste.

Speaking ahead of the exhibition launch, The Leith Collective founder Sara Thomson commented: “The furniture featured in this exhibition was built to last. These items have all had a life, they have maybe had a few knocks along the way (haven’t we all?!) but that’s no reason to discard them and replace them with a modern MDF flatpack item. 

“This exhibition shows that with a little imagination, many household items can be transformed – not just turned back into something functional, but into something truly beautiful.” 

Furniture Reimagined is open now until 31st May 2023 and is free to view at all three Leith Collective stores – Edinburgh’s Ocean Terminal and Fort Kinnaird, as well as Glasgow’s St Enoch Centre.

Some exhibition items are available to purchase and delivery is available.

  • The Leith Collective at Ocean Terminal
    Ocean Drive, Edinburgh, EH6 6JJ
    Opening hours: Monday – Saturday 11am – 6pm, and Sunday 11am – 5pm
  • The Leith Collective at Fort Kinnaird

Newcraighall, Edinburgh, EH15 3RD

Opening hours: 10am – 8pm seven days a week

  • The Leith Collective at St Enoch Centre
    Glasgow, G1 4BW – Opening hours: 10am – 5pm, seven days a week
  • For more information about The Leith Collective head to www.theleithcollective.com, email info@theleithcollective.com, or call 07447 659 999.

Man who died following Granton Crescent disturbance named by Police

Charles Paul, 69, was found with serious injuries after officers were called to a property in Granton Crescent around 11.20pm on Saturday, 25 March, 2023. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

A 36-year-old woman was taken to Edinburgh Royal Infirmary with serious but not life-threatening injuries.

Charles Paul

A 28-year-old man was arrested and charged in connection with the incident. He appeared at Edinburgh Sheriff Court on Monday, 27 March, 2023.