Wow. A lot has happened since I last posted a news story on here. I spent some years teaching and then I went back to local journalism – where I started out in 1998!
I have been working at the Stornoway Gazette since September 2024 as a reporter and I recently started a couple of publications on Substack, in order to get more eyes on my work. These Substacks are Katie Laing Outdoors and Hebridean Breakers – and please feel free to subscribe to them, if you would like to follow my work on that platform.
However, I am also going to be publishing the meatier pieces on here, as it makes sense for writers to post their content in a space they own, as well as one they rent.
Without further ado, I will get into my latest post, which went out on Hebridean Breakers on Friday morning and is a deep dive into personnel issues within two NHS Western Isles directorates: Public Health and Dental.
Directorates led by Colum Durkan and Joanne Bark, respectively.
This piece is based on research I did for my day job as a senior journalist at my paper and that research included interviews with multiple NHS staff, past and present.
(The picture featured is of the NHS Western Isles health board offices in Stornoway.)
Initially, before I started getting into the data, I was hearing stories about staff who were unsettled and unhappy in their work.
Then I began hearing of staff leaving their posts. Some were taking early retirement and a big hit to their pension with that decision to ‘go early’.
Others were just walking away.
Highly-qualified and experienced people were pulling the plugs on careers built up over decades that they were passionate about.
Morale was at rock bottom.
Getting into the nitty gritty, the first story I got into the news related to Dental. This story was about how the two long-serving dentists in the Uists both quit within weeks of each other.
When this story emerged it prompted big questions about management – and the ramifications are still being felt today. Discussions are understood to be ongoing at various levels about how to progress the conversation and heal staff wounds.
The resignations of both Iain McKinnon and John Jolly late last year, with their decades of experience between them, were said to have stemmed from contractual problems.
Mr McKinnon was reported to be taking up a new NHS job elsewhere, with multiple unconfirmed reports that NHS Western Isles refused to accommodate requests for more family-friendly terms.
Mr Jolly’s resignation was said to be connected to the creation of a new post of senior dental officer as part of the process of ‘organisational change’.
That post was advertised internally but there were no successful candidates at interview. The post subsequently went out to external advert. Mr Jolly quit shortly after the internal process.
At the time, NHS Western Isles confirmed it was seeking locums to fill the gap and questions were asked about whether it had been accommodating enough to its existing dentists – especially given the difficulty to ‘recruit and retain’ staff in remote and rural areas such as ours.
At the time we reported the two dentists had quit, a source within Dental said their service had gone from being stable for years to going into crisis “all of a sudden”.
My second story was based on figures I obtained recently from NHS Western Isles in a Freedom of Information request. The figures showed a big rise in sickness absence over the past few years in the Public Health directorate.
I should say at this point that, in the course of building these two stories, I spoke with multiple sources at NHS Western Isles and did in-depth interviews with five of them.
All wanted to be anonymous, for fear of repercussions if they were caught talking to the press.
Many of them described the situations at work and the management style of their directors in very similar terms. Their experiences aligned with each other and gave great credibility to their claims.
In law or in journalism, you need to have two people saying the same thing for corroboration. With five sources all singing from the same hymn sheet, these stories were well corroborated.
And it was these stories that led me to go looking for the data.
So what did I get from my Freedom of Information request to NHS Western Isles?
The data showed the number of days lost to sickness across Public Health rose more than four times from 237 to 1064 between the years 2024/25 and 2025/26.
These figures coincided with Colum Durkan coming into post in 2024.
The sickness was accompanied by a rise of nearly five times the cost of sickness from £41,672 to £199,326 for the same period – although staff sources have since said that figure could be higher.
This is because the calculated costs were based on a mid-point band five post.
The data also showed absences were most notable among more senior staff, with around half of the absences being from staff in band six posts or above.
Staff absence from staff in band six or above posts went up from 17 to 37 between 2024/25 and 2025/26.
This aligned with claims made by staff that the employees being most impacted were the more senior ones – those directly reporting to Mr Durkan or being line managed by him.
The Public Health Directorate is made up of four departments: Health Promotion, Information Technology, Public Health and the Public Health Intelligence & Info Service.
In the Public Health Intelligence and Information Service department of the directorate, the number of sickness days rose more than 10 times from 30 to 336 between 2024/5 and 25/26.
Health Promotion sickness days rose from 181 to 440. Information Technology sickness days rose from 14 to 79. Sickness within the Public Health department itself rose from 12 to 209.
Meanwhile, despite the steep rises in sickness days and costs, the number of staff employed within Public Health over this period changed only slightly, going from 36.25 in 2025 to 41.46 in 2026.
The rising sickness trend was not mirrored in other NHS Western Isles directorates.
For comparison’s sake, other data showed a slight increase in sickness in other directorates, rising from 19,691 sickness days to 20,750, with the costs going up from £3.4million to £3.8million.
Across these other directorates, the number of staff employed, calculated on a whole time equivalent basis, increased slightly from 867.29 to 873.65 between 2024/25 to 2025/26.
So small changes. Nothing like those seen in Public Health.
A former member of staff within Public Health said: “The findings are definitely significant. It’s about regime change and new styles of management coming in.”
They urged the leadership of NHS Western Isles to address the problem, “difficult as it may be”, and said staff had clearly been “either sidelined, sidetracked or not listened to”, during the period of organisational change.
The problem was now “in the pile of things that are too difficult to deal with”.
Anecdotally, the stories from staff have been very similar.
One described interactions with Mr Durkan as being “like dealing with Trump”. Another described him in terms that were not printable.
Another said the issue was not being addressed “because HR don’t want to admit they’ve hired a dud”. And they said of Mr Durkan: “He should be fired.”
A spokesperson for NHS Western Isles responded: “We do not agree that there is, or recognise, a staffing establishment crisis in our Public Health Department. During 2024, the Director of Public Health reviewed the structures and systems, and an organisational change process was completed.
“The figures released under FOI provide a snapshot of workforce data over a defined period, but they do not, in themselves, explain the reasons behind the data.
“Drawing conclusions about causation – including linking variations in sickness absence to a particular individual or point in time – is not possible without a much fuller analysis that considers a wide range of contextual factors.”
They also said: “We continue to keep workforce data under regular review and to support staff wellbeing and service sustainability across all our services.”
