About the practice
There has been a practice based in Lochmaddy covering the islands of North Uist and Berneray since the formation of the NHS. It was initially a single-handed dispensing practice served by Dr A J MacLeod, succeeded by his son Dr J A J MacLeod ‘Doctor John’ in about 1970.
Under Dr John the practice became a two partner training practice, and the two islands were joined by a causeway in 1999. The premises were originally part of the doctors residence, but have undergone considerable extension onto an adjacent site letting it treble in size from its original dimensions.
All NHS professionals based in the practice area – including Community Nurses, Health Visitors, Dental staff, Physiotherapists and Podiatrists work from the building. District surgeries are held weekly in Carinish and Bayhead, and fortnightly on Berneray to help meet the needs of a widely dispersed population.
A community hospital was established on the neighbouring island of Benbecula in 2001. However many patients still need to be flown to larger hospitals in Stornoway, Glasgow or Inverness for specialised services. Uist and Barra Hospital serves North Uist, Benbecula, South Uist and Barra. It has 29 beds, an A+E department, X-ray, a maternity room, a palliative care room and an operating theatre. In addition – Dr Senior from Benbecula is able to perform endoscopies locally after a new unit was opened in 2008.
About this website
This space was created in June 2009 as an experiment in web design by myself – Dr Gerry Wheeler This is my first attempt at doing a website – so please be gentle! If you have any comments or suggestions feel free to email me here.
It has been created using WordPress with the help of a theme by Bos89. I have found the simple press forum, advanced MCE and NextGen Gallery plugins to be invaluable in making the whole process easier, and would also recommend ‘WordPress for business bloggers’ by Paul Thewlis as a useful guide to basic Website and blog design. The site is hosted at http://dx3webs.com – I would certainly recommend them if you wanted to discuss a web site design of your own.
The banner pictures were all taken in North Uist. You will need Adobe flash player to view them – it can be downloaded here if you don’t already have it. The picture on the front page was taken from the practice carpark. I would recommend downloading ‘cooliris’ for your browser to be able to see all the gallery pictures on a 3D wall. IE6 users may find some formatting issues with the site as wordpress doesen’t support this very well – you should update to either firefox or IE8.
This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.
