Sally Allen: Torbay health services in danger as NHS leaders face funding crisis

Everything about the NHS and the country’s wellbeing are linked, and currently it is in the most precarious position ever.

Obviously, the main reason is lack of funding, but a huge responsibility must also lie with the shocking lack of intelligent management. There are so many highly paid tiers in the NHS management structure which could never be sustained or approved of in the corporate sector. It has become unwieldy and so badly run that it is now in danger of falling off the edge of a metaphorical cliff! 

Since July 5, 1948, our NHS has been the envy of the world, with the UK community benefiting from it on a national basis. Added to this, for good or bad, people have also flocked to enjoy its services from all over the world. Now due to miss-use, miss-management and lack of funding, it is in crisis.

Personally, I fear for its future, particularly seeing the machinations up close and personal because of questioning, on behalf of The Heart Campaign, the sense of the latest foolhardy ‘Case for Change’ currently under discussion. I say ‘under discussion’ but so far, the public have been ignored and excluded from any discussion. This is in spite of the redoubtable Susie Colley sending virtual cartloads of ‘freedom of information’ requests to ‘One Devon’ (the NHS Integrated Care Board for Devon). 

We are thwarted and avoided whenever possible and political media trainers would be very proud of the NHS managements’ unrivalled skill for not answering a straightforward question with a straight answer!

Last Thursday, the Torquay Chamber of Commerce and the Heart Campaign, both of which Susie is chair, tried to bring together all the parties who are keen to get answers to the issues regarding adult social care as well as the Heart Campaign.

Even with the horrendous weather, there was a great turnout from the public all going to get some answers. We were fortunate to have Steve Darling MP, David Thomas, leader of the council, Anna Coles, director of adult social care at the council, Chris Balch, chair of the Torbay Hospital Trust alongside Joe Teape, the chief executive and Dr Kate Lissett, the chief medical officer at Torbay Hospital.

In the audience was Caroline Voaden MP and two cardiologists from the hospital. Everyone was keen to participate and try to find solutions to the dreadful mess we are in. However, guess who wasn’t there? No big surprise really, any representative at all from One Devon (NHS ICB), the only people who can really answer the questions in any detail.

Everyone else present, and I include the audience, was under the misapprehension that we might all get some idea of how to fix the major problem facing us on the future of Torbay’s Integrated Care services, which have been in place for over 20 years to provide better care for some of our bay’s most vulnerable residents.

Joe Teape and Chris Balch from Torbay and South Devon NHS Foundation Trust explained that they are now being required to make up to £50 million in savings, as the Labour Government is less sympathetic to the budget pressures facing our local NHS.

Steve Darling MP has been quoted as saying: “This could lead to the Trust withdrawing from the long-standing integrated care arrangement. The end of integrated care services would have a serious impact on vulnerable residents, so it is vital that everyone has their say. The local NHS Trust must now hold a full consultation on their proposed withdrawal, and I will continue to press for transparency and community involvement in these decisions.”

Naturally, this all has a massive impact across the whole of health care as everything is interwoven and is part of a highly unstable pack of cards. 

A week or so ago, I saw the most remarkable interview on Good Morning Britain, when Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Wes Streeting, was given an embarrassing one out of five rating for his efforts to end corridor care in hospitals. Despite government promises it continues to be a huge issue across the country and Dr Ian Higginson, the President of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, who is based in Plymouth, appeared on the programme to warn that the practice has been alarmingly ‘normalised’ before delivering the damning verdict.

Speaking to presenters Richard Madeley and Ranvir Singh, Dr Higginson said: “Although our patients have come to expect corridor care, I don’t think it’s fair to say that they’re not outraged by it when they experience it. Our staff and my members continue to be outraged about it. I don’t get any sense of urgency about political solutions in the pipeline to this across any of those four nations, and I do not hear senior leaders within the NHS having the courage to speak out about the extent of this problem within their organisations.”

He continued: “It takes organisations like ourselves to point out how normalised it's become.”  

They now even have meal rounds for patients on trolleys in hospital corridors to help look after them!

“We have nurses employed looking after patients in corridors and this should not be happening. It wouldn’t be acceptable in any other part of the hospital. It wouldn't be acceptable in any other industry. So, to allow it to happen in our emergency departments, that’s what we're all really angry about,” he fumed.

Laying the blame firmly at the feet of the government and their policies he said: “This has all been about failures in health policy, which is squarely at the doors of political leaders. We’ve been cutting the number of hospital beds and failing to look into an obvious future and set up all the social and community care that's needed to back up hospitals.”

“What it means is that we tend to concentrate our patients into very few hospitals. It’s not done in quite such a concentrated way across the world. What it means is that our hospitals are absolutely full to bursting.”

Expanding on what he meant, he said: “The really rubbish thing about this is that we’ve known this has been happening for years. We’ve seen it coming for years and yet we’ve not been investing in long-term solutions. We need to get our act together around social and community care, so the patients, who don’t need to be in hospital have somewhere to go, which will free up beds.”

“We need to actually generate more beds within our hospitals. We can’t keep closing them. We have to find a way to open more beds. We also need to get our hospitals working effectively across the working week, so that we don’t close down the acute sector, say, on Saturdays and Sundays, we keep it working flat out so that we can keep our patients as safe as possible once they get into hospital. Those three things are probably the key elements to solving the problem.”

Asked by Singh how he would rate Wes Streeting’s efforts, he issued the embarrassing appraisal: “I would give the governments across the four nations at the moment one star for the way that they’ve been proactively approaching this problem. What I’d love to see is them up to five stars. That’s what we all want. We’re ready to provide advice on how to do it, as are a number of other organisations.”

As I said at the beginning, everything is linked so the inevitable fallout will spare no one. The government must act now. The NHS is the one sector where they cannot cut budgets.

However, they could cut costs with better management skills and by listening to the doctors, nurses and consultants at the pointy end who are experiencing the currently insurmountable problems. For example, the cardiologists at Torbay Hospital know quite clearly how to improve the services and save money at the same time.

The politicians at Westminster need to listen to them and Dr Higginson, not their highly paid ICB administrators.