Bute Care Campaign - Keeping Us Together

Aim: We’re campaigning for more care home beds on Bute, so that our elderly can stay near loved ones and live out their final years in community.

Our Vision and our need: Care for the elderly - close to home on the Isle of Bute 

We started this campaign after nearly losing our mother—not to illness, but to distance. Sometimes the ferries can not run due to weather and that happened, we were unable to reach our mother because she was in a care home on the mainland. We were stuck on Bute. And she almost died alone.

We made it just in time and advocated for her there and then.  Although she was gravely ill with sepsis and pneumonia, her condition was treatable. We arranged to transfer her to hospital and, over three weeks, she recovered. If she had been cared for on the island—near us—her illness would never have progressed to that stage.

Ours is not the only story. There have been other heartbreaking cases where elderly people are isolated or died alone in mainland care homes, simply because ferries were cancelled and families could not reach them on time.  Families dread the separation and isolation of their loved ones, placed on a mainland care home and live with a burden of guilt that the separation brings.  Due to the distance and the ocean to cross -  it is difficult for families to maintain regular enough contact with their relatives.  Families, most of whom would have seen their relatives everyday, before their move to mainland care. 

The Isle of Bute has over 6,000 residents, yet there are only nine care beds - eight residential and one respite bed, for the elderly. As a result, many of our most vulnerable are being sent to care homes far from the island—away from everything familiar, and everyone who loves them.

It doesn’t have to be this way and we want this to stop.

We are campaigning Argyll and Bute council to expand local care home capacity on Bute so that our elderly can remain close to family, community, and dignity. With your support, we hope to show the local authority that there is public will, community need, and moral urgency to act.

We are donating our time and work on a voluntary basis. The funds raised by this page will pay for the expenses of continuing our community awareness campaign—producing posters, fact sheets, and an educational website about the issue. We are also hosting meetings, public events, and a support group for those affected.  I spent over £200 of my own funds so far on printing, stationery and travel to Dunoon to deliver petitions and letters to the council.   

Funds will enable us to keep momentum on the campaign and apply enough pressure to make this a reality.  This would be a long-overdue investment in Bute’s care infrastructure by our local authority and the Scottish Government.

Please help us bring our parents and grandparents home—not in memory, but in life.  Thank you for all your tremendous support to date. 

Funding method

Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made by 5th August 2025 at 10:07am