Charity fights to save drinkers’ unit

The charity Men’s Health Highland has piled pressure on Highland Council, NHS Highland and Northern Constabulary to rescue the only 24-hour unit for alcoholics in Inverness.

It is writing to council chiefs, urging them to reverse a decision taken earlier this year by councillors to halt the authority’s £200,000 annual funding, on which the Beechwood House unit depends.

It has also highlighted the fact that virtually all of the unit’s clients are referred by either the police or the health board.

Highland Council had approached the force and the health authority asking for a contribution to the running costs.

But they, too, are having to make spending cuts to balance next year’s books, so neither has taken up the invitation.

In a statement yesterday, Men’s Health Highland said the funding cut was “all the more surprising when we are all being made aware of the serious problem with alcohol in Scotland at the present time”.

Its convener, Trevor Escott, said the charity had learned that 888 people accessed Beechwood House last year. Of those, 398 were police referrals and 432 were medical referrals.

The facility, at the Church of Scotland-owned Beechwood House in Old Perth Road, is run by the voluntary organisation CrossReach. It has registered 17,000 admissions since it opened in 1991, prompted by a number of deaths of alcoholics in police custody. It now faces closure, with the loss of 10 jobs.

Former Inverness district councillor Sheila Mackay has warned that lives will be lost if the eight-bed unit’s “inevitable” closure follows.