A health official at Dr Gray’s Hospital yesterday vowed to provide the “safest possible service” for mums as medical bosses deal with the recruitment crisis in the maternity department.
Divisional clinical director Dr Jamie Hogg said he was confident new staff could be found to staff the unit within the next year.
Maternity services in the town will become midwife-led from July 18, with medium and high-risk births dealt with at hospitals in Aberdeen or Inverness instead.
This is due to a lack of junior doctors working in the ward.
Concerned families hit out at the plans when they were announced earlier this week and a petition was launched against the move attracting more than 11,000 signatures.
Campaign group Keep Mum branded the new service “unsafe.”
Now Dr Hogg has offered reassurances to anyone worried about the changes.
He said: “We can reassure mums we are putting in place the safest possible service for now and within a year we will reinstate the service as it was but first we need to fix some things, fix the junior doctor problem, we need to find more paediatricians to come and join the team, those are the two main tasks we face.
“We are confident we can do it by August 2019.”
Dr Hogg also said that staff at NHS Grampian and Dr Gray’s were doing as much as they could to attract more junior doctors to the area. He added: “We have worked quite hard to get the job to become more attractive and we are going to help develop advanced nurse practitioners who will take over some of the jobs at the night,” he said. “This will mean the junior doctors will have more time to train during the day so that makes the job more attractive.”
NHS Grampian held an open day yesterday at Elgin Town Hall to allow worried residents to air their concerns to management.
Keep Mum campaigner Amy Fraser was still unhappy claiming there was a lack of answers from the health board at the event.
She said: “I think they want to fob us off and for us to be quiet and go away. We still haven’t seen a risk assessment, I’m concerned there will be fatalities, people will lose their lives and that is NHS Grampian’s fault.”
Moray MSP Richard Lochhead attended the NHS Grampian public drop-in event and spoke about the need for the health board to be more open with concerned locals.
He said: “This is a very anxious time for families and those directly affected particularly women who are expecting in the coming months and it’s absolutely essential that NHS Grampian are able to answer their questions and provide reassurance that they will receive the best care possible despite the downgrading of the maternity unit.”
With the maternity service being forced to downgrade because of the lack of junior doctors taking jobs in Moray, Mr Lochhead was also keen to promote the region as a great place to work.
“Trainee doctors or consultants or nurses who choose to live and work in Moray don’t look back because they have their eyes open to what a great place this is,” he said.
“The key is to attract them to come and work here in the first place and we need innovative ways in which we can boost Dr Gray’s appeal to trainee doctors and consultants and other staff.”
Douglas Ross, MP for Moray, was also in attendance at the event and slammed NHS Grampian claiming there did not appear to be a plan in place to deal with this problem sooner.
He said: “NHS Grampian say they are working towards providing a long-term sustainable solution to the crisis at the maternity unit but this problem has been years in the making.
“Expectant mothers are extremely worried about this, but it isn’t just them. We are all worried about the downgrading of services at our local hospital and I want the Cabinet Secretary for Health to explain how this has been allowed to happen. More importantly we need reassurances that resources, whether that be junior doctors or funding, will be provided at Dr Gray’s urgently because in the meantime, mothers having to travel to Aberdeen to give birth just isn’t acceptable.”