A DUNFERMLINE resident asked senior leaders from NHS Fife on Monday to consider the reinstatement of A&E facilities for the city of Dunfermline.

The question was part of the health board’s public annual review session on Monday afternoon at Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy.

“Will Queen Margaret Hospital get an A&E?” the question asked.

“The size of the City and the new housing seem to support this. There are waits for ambulances to Victoria Hospital Kirkcaldy. Staff are amazing but services are so stretched, which in turn must cause extra stress to staff doing their job and dealing with the public.”

NHS Fife was firm in its response – they said opening A&E services in Dunfermline is not possible at this time.

“An A&E does not operate in isolation; it’s part of an acute hospital and in order to deliver services that an A&E is dependent on, they all have to be collocated. We couldn’t do that. We couldn’t open all those services in Dunfermline,” NHS Fife medical director Chris McKenna said.

“Even if we were to say ‘let’s open one in Dunfermline and just do it’, it would increase patient safety risk. Harm would happen to people and I can’t allow that to happen on my watch.”

The risk of harm, Mr McKenna said, would come from transporting patients “all over the place” to get them where they really need to be for care.

“I accept that the people of Dunfermline would like to have an A&E department and I understand, but for the sake of patient safety it must be delivered here in Victoria Hospital with all those other services alongside them,” Mr McKenna said.

“We can’t change the fact that this is now the acute hospital for all of Fife.”

The accident and emergency unit at Queen Margaret shut its doors in 2012 and, despite several campaigns, health bosses have insisted that the current model is the correct one.

Just two years after the closure, a petition organised by local campaigner Jim Philp calling for the service to reopen in Dunfermline  attracted 20,000 signatures while in 2022, local councillor Gavin Ellis called for the then health minister Humza Yousaf to attend a meeting of the City of Dunfermline area committee to answer questions about an upgrade of the hospital.

In January, Fife Conservative MSP Roz McColl also called for the return of an A&E department to Dunfermline saying it was "clear" that the Victoria Hospital could not cope with the level of demand on its own.