Submitting.
And he called on the Scottish Government to “end the ambiguity” over its plans and commit to a new hospital at Little France.
Gordon Brown with Dr Hector Chawla Picture: Alex Hewitt
His intervention, just days before the Holyrood elections, comes as Dr Hector Chawla, the consultant responsible for the sight-saving surgery in 1971, sets out in today’s Scotsman why the proposal to disperse services, put forward by the government as an alternative to a new hospital, would not work.
The government told NHS Lothian in December it would not fund a new hospital “now or in the foreseeable future” despite agreeing in principle to the project in 2018 and allowing more than £1 million to be spent on planning the new building. Instead, it said NHS Lothian should review eyecare services, suggesting community optometrists could take a bigger role and operations could be carried out at a new elective centre in Livingston yet to be built.