Maria arrived in Fort William in early March, part of a wave of hospitality workers who descend on the town ahead of the spring hiking season. She’d come from another part of Europe to work in a hotel kitchen, drawn by a combination of decent wages, the promise of the Highlands, and a friend who’d done the same route the year before. Within a week she was on split shifts — early breakfast prep, a break in the middle of the day, then back in for evening service. She didn’t know the town, didn’t know the health system, and didn’t have a GP.
“I had a few things I wanted to ask someone about,” she says, speaking through a translator at a recent Helix session. “Nothing serious, I thought. But they’d been in my head for a while.”
She’d seen a Helix flyer in the staff room but assumed it was for people with more urgent needs. That’s a common reaction. The drop-in model can feel counterintuitive when you’re used to healthcare that’s rationed by urgency — if you don’t have an acute problem, maybe you don’t qualify for support. What Maria didn’t know yet was that Helix isn’t a triage service. It’s an information and conversation service. Anyone who wants to ask a health question, understand their options, or just talk through how they’re feeling is exactly who it’s for.
It was a colleague who finally encouraged her to go. “She’d been to a session and said it was just a normal chat. That it wasn’t like going to the doctor. That helped.”
What Maria found when she arrived was a quiet room, a health advocate with time to listen, and no paperwork to fill in. She got answers to the questions she’d been sitting on, a referral to a specific service she hadn’t known existed, and — perhaps most importantly — the knowledge that the support was there if she needed it again.
“I felt like I was being taken seriously,” she says. “Like it mattered that I was here, even if only for a few months.”
That sense of mattering is something the Helix team talks about a lot. Seasonal workers are economically vital to Fort William — they staff the kitchens, lead the tours, run the accommodation — but they often fall through the cracks of services designed around permanent residents. Helix is built on the premise that a worker’s health needs don’t become less real because their contract is temporary.
Maria has since moved on, as seasonal workers do. But she left knowing how to access health information in her next location, and with a clearer sense of what she’s entitled to ask for. For Helix, that’s exactly the outcome the programme is designed to produce: not dependency, but capability. People who know how to look after themselves, whatever the next season brings.
If Maria’s story sounds familiar — if you’ve been sitting on questions you haven’t known how to ask, or assuming the support isn’t really meant for you — it is. Come in. You don’t need to explain yourself, prove anything, or have an urgent problem. Just show up, and ask what you want to ask.