大象传媒

Robert (Rab) and Margaret met during the miner's strike. Rab was a miner and Margaret was in the coilliery choir. When mining diminished, Rab retrained as a psychiatric nurse. He's now retired and has returned to his first love of poetry - written largely in Scots - while his wife Margaret is a classroom assistant. They both live in New Cumnock in Ayrshire in a house they built themselves. Rob was a staff nurse on a psychiatric ward at Ailsa Hospital in Ayr. It was an intensive psychiatric care unit so they only had seven patients. In 2006, he was given a verbal handover report when he came on shift and was told that it had been quiet all day and there was nothing to report. When his shift began alongside the other three night-shift staff, they did a head-count of the patients and instantly discovered one was missing. It transpired that the patient had not been allowed out for months, and the previous day the consultant had granted him 'time parole' as a trust-building exercise. That evening, at 6.10pm, the day-staff let him out unaccompanied. They'd logged him going out, but then forgot about him and he never returned. He'd absconded. Rab ended up being implicated, despite not being responsible, and as his case escalated, he fought back and exposed deep-rooted issues regarding trust and transparency in his branch of the NHS. He asked repeatedly to see the critical incident report, and was refused over and over. Eventually his local MP supported him in a Freedom of Information request to see the report, at which point he discovered a huge number of fabrications and allusions to wrongdoing on his part, when in actual fact, he was the person that brought the incident to light. Through it all, he simply wanted to tell the truth and was eventually completely exonerated.