By John MacMillan

AS the CEO of a Scottish charity, I can truthfully say that the past 15 months have been the most difficult and challenging I have faced in my career.

I have been in post at the Eric Liddell Centre in Edinburgh for several years now and I am proud to head up a dedicated team of staff and to work with a very supportive board of trustees.

While our centre is usually a busy and vibrant community hub, our speciality is dementia day care and support for carers.

Our core group of service users are vulnerable and often isolated. When we had to close down our Centre once Covid hit, we knew we had to somehow keep our services going.

With lack of income from the groups who use the centre, we have suffered a financial haemorrhage, resulting in a shortfall of £165,000 and I recognise there is a long road to recovery.

Finances notwithstanding, I can only pay tribute to our board of trustees who continued to support and enable us to keep operational and my amazing team which turned our operations into a online continuation of service within 24 hours.

The team worked within the Covid restrictions but also managed to get a range of services up and running, covering everything from delivery of homemade lunches to prescriptions pickup and delivery.

Since the May 6 Holyrood elections and the Scottish Government announcement of new ministerial posts, I welcome Humza Yousaf as Scotland’s new Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care. I wish him success and look forward to working with him.

I urge our Scottish Parliament MSPs to implement the recommendations contained in the Independent Review of Adult Social Care (often referred to as the Feeley Report) that was published in Scotland in February 2021.

People have said for years that it makes absolute sense to combine our health and social care systems, followed by the inevitable caveat that it would be too expensive to achieve this.

However, in the last 15 months, faced with a massive health crisis, bureaucracy and its rule books were thrown out the window and we discovered just how quickly and efficiently major things could be achieved.

I ask our new Scottish Parliament to learn from Covid-19 and recognise this is a unique opportunity to restructure, rebuild and refinance a workable new health and social care model, where funding is adequate to provide for the needs of all the people in Scotland.

This includes funding for local health and social care partnerships. The Feeley Report asks for a clear distinction between the range of services provided for older people who have a neurological condition such as dementia and others with complex health needs, as the needs of each group are significantly different.

Looking to the future, the question is not whether Scotland can afford to implement the Feeley recommendations but put much more simply, we cannot afford not to do so.

John MacMillan is CEO of the Eric Liddell Centre