Following Health and Social Care Secretary Therese Coffey’s statement to parliament, Mr Seely welcomed the government’s plans, stating: “I am delighted that there will be more support for pharmacies and dentists and that there will be more GP appointments. This will be vital for delivering the excellent healthcare that Islanders deserve.”
The Secretary of State announced a set of objectives for her department as part of her ‘plan for patients’. She set out expectations that everyone requiring an appointment with their GP will receive one within two weeks, patients with urgent needs will be prioritised for same-day appointments, and contacting a GP will be made easier by making an additional 31,000 phone lines available for GP practices.
Coffey intends to shorten ambulance response times - enabled by a faster handover of patients - and improve capacity and resource availability by increasing efficiency and the number of available call handlers.
The ‘plan for patients’ intends to reduce waiting times by expanding the public health-care service’s capacity, building community diagnostic centres, changing elements of the NHS pension scheme to recruit and retain staff, and prioritising patients with the greatest need.
The ‘plan for patients’ will improve Care services, bolster the social care workforce, establish an Adult Social Care Discharge Fund and invest £15 million to encourage the international recruitment of care workers.
Coffey also announced plans to make accessing general practices easier, expanding the services available for community pharmacies, implementing more targeted funding for dentists caring for patients with complex needs, and removing bureaucracy for registering dentists that have trained abroad.
The Secretary of State said that the ‘plan for patients’ was based on evidence given by healthcare professionals: “We have listened and we are responding by removing various reasons that healthcare professionals say are holding them back from doing what they do best: caring for patients.”
The Health Secretary also recognised the geographical variation within the NHS, stating “The data shows that sadly there is too much variation in the care people receive – dental deserts; discharge delays; ambulance delays.”
Coffey promised to “endeavour, through a powerful partnership with the NHS and local authorities, to level-up and match the expectations that the public rightly have.”
Mr Seely asked the Health Secretary about “the specific needs of what her department calls ‘unavoidably small hospitals’, 12 [of which are] in England and Wales, covering twenty constituencies… of which St Mary’s is the most isolated.” Seely asked the Health Secretary “will she or her ministers meet with me… to discuss what more can be done to ensure support for these small hospitals which are so important for our communities.”
The Secretary of State confirmed that her department is working with the Isle of Wight Council on how they can begin discharging patients that no longer require treatment to increase the number of available beds.
The Secretary of State also affirmed that she knew “how important it is to make sure that the hospital itself can function readily.”
In response, Mr Seely stated that “we’ve done good work improving funding for unavoidably small hospitals, but there’s more to be done and I will work with MPs from across Parliament to make sure smaller hospitals - like St Mary’s - can care for constituents.”
