‘Let charity begin at home’

Now, let us look at our own health service, once a shining beacon of good care, sadly reduced to a second-rate service by cost cutting.

Strong comments, some might say, but let us look at what we have.

Is it something like 130 nurses short at the moment, with ward closures caused by staff shortages, people being misdiagnosed at A&E, despite being charged good money for the use of that service, presumably because scanners were not available due to budget cuts? It seems the fracture clinic is now closed on Thursdays, so please don’t break a bone on a Wednesday.

We are seeing delays of over a year in knee replacements – totally unacceptable, particularly when it affects people still in work as we get a double whammy of paying out for sick or disability pay while also losing income tax and social security payments while that person is out of work.

So it is clear that our health service is in crisis, despite whatever their modern slogans or buzzwords happen to be, and so I have to ask, why are we putting money into overseas aid when we, the taxpaying Guernsey public, are getting such a poor service in our own island?

It is very well known that Guernsey residents are very generous to many charities with their own personal donations and I think the plethora of charity shops support this view.

So to quote the old saying, let charity begin at home and when, and only when, we get back to having a health service we can be proud of should we think about sending taxpayers’ money overseas.

TREVOR HOCKEY

Trev’s Motorcycles.

Editor’s footnote: Deputy Heidi Soulsby, president of the Committee for Health & Social Care, responds: It is disappointing, and rather perplexing, when we receive comments about how much better the health service was at some indeterminate time in the past. A review of the letters page over the last decade at least would probably show similar letters. The truth is there are more services, drugs and treatments provided today than ever before. Outcomes are improving all the time and with it, life expectancy, which is now in the top 10 in the world.

In relation to the specific comments made by the writer, it should be made clear that services have not been cut. No wards are closed, the Fracture Clinic does not close on Thursdays and all our scanners within Radiology are available for service delivery and are running as required. In terms of staff, we have around 1,000 nurses across HSC. There has therefore always been considerable turnover and vacancies to manage with a staff group this size, meaning HSC will need to continue to actively advertise, attend recruitment fairs, train nurses and engage agency staff where required to deliver its services.

The Emergency Department provides a consultant and associate consultant led service 24/7 for the island and delivers for patients using a fixed cost tariff, charged according to complexity of case. If the writer feels the ED team has misdiagnosed, we would take this extremely seriously and would look into the case through our dedicated governance team. The writer needs to get in touch for us to investigate this claim and any other matter that is affecting them.

Any delays to inpatient services are regrettable but can occur for a range of factors such as demand, hospital bed availability, patient choice and fitness or because clinical staff are engaged in emergencies, for example. Our admissions team always contact any patient who has a procedure postponed and works with them to rearrange.

HSC, and its secondary health care partner MSG, work hard to provide the services required of them and actively seek to deliver ongoing improvements. The issue of Overseas Aid is a political one and not for Health & Social Care to comment on specifically. However, when considering whether our service is second rate, it is probably worth noting that in sub-saharan Africa there are 546 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births (it’s single figures in the UK), with women often needing to travel on foot for miles to attend a clinic to give birth, life expectancy is around 62 and 26% of health facilities have no electricity at all.

We have very different challenges to sub-Saharan Africa, of course. Our demographic profile in particular is putting a real strain on services and is why we have developed a new model of care with a key focus on prevention and early intervention.

We now spend more than ever before on health and care. We could always spend more. What we are always trying to do is ensure that we are not wasteful and continually improve to meet the needs of the people of the Bailiwick in the best way possible and that is what we are committed to doing.