Devon STP
Devon STP: there is ‘no rush’ to make decisions on community hospital buildings. What’s more, it hasn’t agreed what a ‘health hub’ is or how many there should be
Speaking for the Devon NHS Sustainability and Transformation Partnership (STP), Dr Sonja Manton told a meeting of county councillors this morning that there was ‘no rush’ to decide the future of community hospital buildings.
Contrary to Dr Simon Kerr’s suggestion in April that decisions would be made in July, Dr Manton was clear that the end of July is a deadline for the Devon Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) to bid for capital funding from NHS England, but not for decisions about the local estate. If these two were previously linked, they are not any more.
She also confirmed what she said to me some months ago, that no decisions will be made about buildings until after the conclusion of the ‘community conversations’ such as Seaton Area Health Matters and Honiton Health Matters, launched earlier this year, and that discussions are still going on about the distribution of local services.
Dr Manton, who was launching the STP’s two-year report, also stated that there was no agreement yet on what a ‘health hub‘ is, or how many of them there should be.
There is no room at all for complacency, however, since the report states:
We know a large amount of space in our community hospital buildings is underused. The revenue cost of our community hospital estates is in the order of £20 million; money the NHS could use to improve other services. Working with other public sector partners, as part of the One Public Estate initiative, we will review the space that is required to deliver care, and plan to consolidate the number of sites to free up estate and generate money, which can be re-invested in technology and infrastructure.
It also appeared from the meeting that midwife-led maternity services are unlikely to be restored in Honiton or Okehampton any time soon. References were made to staffing difficulties and also safety issues in case of difficulties during birth.
Beds, beds, beds – Devon’s NHS couldn’t or wouldn’t give me their overall occupancy figure for the recent winter: but they were forced to buy in more capacity and there were ’12-hour trolley breaches’
Devon NHS’s Sustainability and Transformation Partnership (STP) admitted in a report to Health Scrutiny yesterday that they had been desperately short of beds during the recent winter. They had to buy in extra beds to keep up with more patients staying longer, because of complex conditions. There were ’12-hour trolley breaches’, where patients had to wait more than 12 hours to be seen.
Despite my asking them directly, they did not give a figure for overall occupancy levels, although they did not deny my suggestion that they had been as bad as or worse than the nationally reported level of 95 per cent. (The nationally recommended safe level is 85 per cent.)
Jo Tearle, Deputy Chief Operating Officer for the Devon CCGs, rebutted my suggestion that cutting community beds had contributed to this crisis, saying that these were not the kind of beds they had needed, and that there had been capacity in community hospitals most of the time. However this suggests that there was no capacity some of the time. It is difficult not to believe that extra community beds wouldn’t have given them more leeway.
Meanwhile, Kerry Storey of Devon County Council indicated the strains that the ‘new model of care’ at home had been under. She said that maintaining personal care at home during the winter had been ‘a real challenge’, requiring ‘creativity and innovation’ – you don’t need much imagination to see that it will have been a real crisis time with frail people at home in isolated areas, care workers and nurses struggling to get through the snow, and staff themselves suffering higher levels of illness.
I and others predicted that because of the closure of community beds, there would be severe pressure on beds in a bad winter or a flu epidemic (and actually, this was not overall a bad winter and the snow episodes were late and short; despite higher levels of flu, there was no epidemic this winter).
Scandal of fundamental changes to Devon’s NHS, which open door to large-scale privatisation, pushed through without public discussion – I have put them on the agenda of next week’s Health Scrutiny Committee
Devon’s two Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) are pushing ahead with far-reaching, highly controversial changes to the NHS in the County from 1st April – without alerting the public or even the public watchdog, the Health and Adult Care Scrutiny Committee at Devon County Council.
The changes will turn the Sustainability and Transformation Plan – which itself grew out of the misnamed ‘Success Regime’ which closed our community hospital beds – into a more permanent Devon Accountable Care System. The first phase, in the first part of the financial year 2017-18, will develop integrated delivery systems, with a single ‘strategic commissioner’ for the whole county.
However the real concern is the next phase, which will lead to the establishment of Accountable Care Organisations. These will lead to services being permanently financially constrained, limiting NHS patients’ options for non-acute conditions, and pushing better-off patients even more towards private practice.
Large chunks of our NHS will be contracted out for long periods, probably to private providers. The ‘toolkit’ for this fundamental change talks about ensuring ‘that there are alternative providers available in the event of provider failure’. In the aftermath of Carillion, do we really want most of our NHS contracted out to private firms?
Devon’s public are not being consulted about this change – unlike in Cornwall where the Council has launched a public consultation – and there is no reason to believe that they want a privatised, two-tier health system.
Devon’s CCGs have pushed the change through without publicity, and it is only because I have put it on the agenda that Health Scrutiny will have a chance to discuss in advance of April 1st. I have written a 7-page paper for the Committee outlining what we know about the ACS and posing eight questions which they should ask about it.
Seaton & Colyton MATTERS 