'Success' is not sustainable
WHEN can success look like failure? As the release of the 2023 Key Performance Indicators reveals, when it’s tied up with hospital services for secondary healthcare patients in Guernsey.
‘How can it be that we performed more surgery last year than ever before, yet couldn’t reduce the waiting list?’ bemoans Health & Social Care president Al Brouard. ‘This is because more and more people every year need our help.’
No wonder Deputy Brouard says that ‘we’ need to re-shape what success looks like. We have ever-increasing and ‘uncontrollable’ demand on services, putting pressure on KPIs, while ‘we cannot turn people away’.
The long-term transformation plans in place to increase capacity to help more people every day will also make extensive demands on staff – staff that HSC doesn’t have, or is paying expensive agencies for. It doesn’t make for a particularly appealing, or pennywise, solution.
Currently, faced with all these issues, HSC’s regular lament is for more money, more staff, more housing for that staff. Just like the waiting lists it faces, that argument is unsustainable.
The ultimate decision facing the community over health care services has to be either for islanders to be prepared to pay more, much more, for our health services, rather than expect an NHS-style service ‘for nothing’, or to radically re-shape those services to make them sustainable for the small island community we sometimes need to recognise that we are.