Our island’s care is at a crossroads

At Health & Social Care it is no different, and a lack of previous provision means we now desperately need accommodation for our permanent staff, not as some commentators would have you believe only to accommodate more agency staff.

One of the main reasons we are having to use agency staff – and we are very grateful for them – is because we are struggling to recruit permanent staff, and a major factor in that recruitment is the lack of any suitable self-contained accommodation.

It’s very easy to do a campaign to save the field and it suits a re-election narrative, but politics is more than that. Politicians at times need to follow the professional advice and that is we need a great deal more staff accommodation on, or close, to the PEH campus. The existing accommodation, John Henry Court, is full, and by far the majority of staff in John Henry are permanent staff working for us day in, day out. Not for all, but a large proportion of staff recruited off-island who will work at the PEH campus wish to be on-site or as close as possible. We have not made this up, it’s what candidates tell us.

We know from the individuals who contact us on a daily basis about their care that they want more home care, less delay in operations, the most modern drugs, we could go on. But to provide these services we need key staff and those staff need somewhere to live.

We have a choice, you can force us to look at a less suitable site, an off-campus site that we are told is far less attractive to potential incoming key workers, or other smaller ones which are less efficient, or we can do the right thing and make a significant difference to making Guernsey an attractive place to work for our key workers.

Yes some other potential site could help to provide a different type of key worker housing and we sincerely hope that they are brought on line too, but all of those options come with considerable delay and don’t address the needs of the cohort of key workers we are looking to accommodate with this development. Our hospital is growing, we have just embarked on a modernisation programme which will increase capacity and fully modernise the facility, and we need the right complement of the right key staff in order for the PEH to continue to function accordingly – we are currently carrying in excess of 400 vacancies across HSC and we will need even more staff going forward as the PEH grows to satisfy the demands of an ageing demographic – it’s a reality that we simply cannot ignore. Using the planning laws to build the accommodation on the campus is not an ‘override of the law’ as some would have you believe, it’s using an existing policy in the planning law which is there for exactly this type of reason.

Our island’s care is at a crossroads, please support us in our efforts to give you the level of service you demand of us.

DEPUTY MARC LEADBEATER

Member, Committee for Health & Social Care

DEPUTY AL BROUARD

President, Committee for Health & Social Care