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Issue 91 July - August 2018
Love Loftus 4 page Centre supplement •• This month 26,300 copies ••
Worrying news from local NHS that doesn't bode well for future?
By Councillor David Walsh RCBC Adult Services Cabinet Member
T
here’s been a degree of potentially worrying news from the local NHS this past fortnight: some of it like the news that the Government has stepped in to take over the running of the South Tees Clinical Commissioning Group dominated local TV on the day. Others - the sheer degree of cuts being demanded of local hospital services, the loss of another community service running out of Brotton Hospital, and the fact that A and E pressures at James Cook Hospital are again near breaking point have either been keep behind wraps or only mentioned within the four walls of a select NHS governors meeting. Let us start with the Clinical Commissioning
Group (CCG). This may not be a name at the tip of your tongue, but the CCG is important to us. It oversees Primary Care Services in our area such as GP surgeries and clinics, it runs community services like district nursing and home physio services,it works with our council in the efficient use of social care resources and above all, it holds the purse strings for the areas GP’s and hospitals. In a very minor role, I’ve sat alongside managers and clinicians working for the CCG and whilst there have been disagreements, I have never doubted their professionalism empathy and feel for the area and people they served. However, they have been for a time in the red financially. This was no secret, and whilst this was reported as a £10.8 million deficit at the end of the financial year, by last week they
had reduced that down by nearly £3 million no mean feat. However, this wasn’t enough for the men from the ministry, and last week it was announced that NHS England was to put the CCG into “Special Measures” with a duty imposed on the local managers to make cuts. The demand, it seems, is to bite into that deficit in this year, and to try to attain some £19 million is “efficiency savings” - cuts in plain English. The CCG stated that this was due to “The South Tees health and care system, like many other NHS systems, experiencing significant financial pressures.” The specific pressures identified were in the provision of “Continuing Health Care” - up from £18 million to £36 million in just 6 years, drugs prescribing, where 7 million separate items are prescribed every year and where expenditure is £4 million more per head of population than elsewhere in the North East and the sheer pressure for hospital-based services especially A and E (of which more later.) Now this is, to me just symptomatic of an area like ours where the longest ever recorded programme of financial austerity we have ever known is joining hands with a poor population suffering from the illnesses and diseases which accompany poverty, a growing cohort of frail elderly, growing frailer every passing year and a legacy of years of cutting back on local walk-in surgeries and community hospitals, all producing that perfect storm we all predicted. You cannot dismiss it, as one local MP was
quoted as doing, as just a problem of “poor book-keeping”. Instead, it goes to the heart of the NHS problems seen everywhere, problems now so deep-rooted that even a belated 70th birthday dowry will be little more than a sticking plaster. But don’t expect this from NHS England. They will be looking for cash cuts to eliminate the deficit, and what I see fills me with foreboding. I am sure they will demand that what they see as the low hanging fruit - cutting back on investment in GP surgeries, looking to see if possibly expensive planned operations above the average tariff price meet “value for money”, the axing of joint services run with local volunteers groups or patient involvement programmes - being early victims. There are two areas where I have especial fears - a possible intent to row back on “Continuing Health Care” where patients leaving hospital but with underlying serious medical issues like deep wounds, pressure ulcers or where treatment has exacerbated the onset of dementia to a point where someone may be a risk to themselves - and a suggestion that the patient be left to cope with non-clinical local authority social care. A warning to anyone who is refused, or where a member of one's family is refused Continuing Health Care. You can appeal against that refusal - although you are often not told this. The other area of concern is a specific budget allocated jointly to both NHS Clinical Continued on page 6 ►►►
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