Agenda item

Verbal update from Councillor Penny Hall

The Chairman introduced Councillor Penny Hall as the elected representative of CBC on the Gloucestershire County Council, Health, Community and Care Scrutiny Committee (HCCOSC).

Councillor Hall had joined the Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee in 2006, as a retired Nurse with experience and knowledge of healthcare provision.

The agenda of the committee changed in November 2009 (to include adult social care, libraries and information, equalities, customer services and lifelong learning), as did the name, to HCCOSC.

The committee focused on health issues from a public perspective and worked with other agencies to improve local health services.

The committee included 8 County Councillors and 6 District Councillors and met 6 times a year at District Councils across the County, enabling members of the community to attend.  

The committee had the power to refer matters (except from Acute Trusts) to the Secretary of State for Health and had last done so in 2006 when radical changes to the Mental Health Service provision for over 65’s were proposed.

Since formed, the committee had received presentations on a variety of issues including;

• The Healthy Gloucestershire Strategy
• Children’s Services
• Annual Report of the Director of Public Health
• The Independence Trust
• The Public Protection Bureau
• Putting People 1^st
• World Class Commissioning
• And the Prison Healthcare Trust

Given the broad remit of the HCCOSC, areas of work over the last year had included;

• Continued monitoring of Gloucestershire PCT, including, A&E performance (the target was 95% of attendees through A&E within 4 hours), ambulance response times, cancer waiting times and smoking cessations. 
• Monitoring the effects of Wingmoor Farm landfill site was a long term matter for the committee, particularly scrutinising the health impact of the site.
• Links with other Health Overview and Scrutiny Committees in the South West, developing a regional joint protocol for specialised health services provided to a small number of people over a large geographical area.  This included complex burns care, treatment for morbid obesity and cancer in children.
• Following proposals earlier this year by the Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust for 200 bed closures, the committee called for a review and detailed public and stakeholder consultation.  The beds were saved and the Trust, along with members of the HCCOSC had developed a Stakeholder Engagement Strategy as a result.
• To learn more about Community and Adult care, members of HCCOSC had visited an 80 bed care home run by St. Johns Trust who specialised in Nursing and Specialist Dementia.  They also visited a unit of 75 retirement homes in Tewkesbury, run by Hanover House. 
• Visits had also been made to the Gloucestershire Archives, the new Gloucester Library and a drop in centre for those with learning difficulties.  The centre in Gloucester was the third in Gloucestershire as part of a pilot and within 3 weeks had over 40 people registered to use it. 

The white paper ‘Equity and excellence liberating the NHS’ was published in July and would not only hugely impact the community but also the role of the HCCOSC.  It would no longer have its current statutory functions allowing it to scrutinise the NHS. 

3 members of the policy team from the Department of Health were invited to meet members of the HCCOSC, of which Councillor Hall was one.  She had been grateful of the opportunity to meet them and offer insight into the work of the HCCOSC. 

The Chief Executive of NHS Gloucestershire would be tabling a report at the meeting of the HCCOSC tomorrow (9 November 2010) and a formal response to the proposals had been submitted to the Department of Health on behalf of the HCCOSC.

She hoped that members had found it as interesting to hear about the work of the HCCOSC as she did undertaking it.  She also took the opportunity to remind members that papers for meetings of the HCCOSC were circulated to them all, inviting them to contact her if there were matters they wished for her to raise.

The Chairman spoke as a County Council representative on the HCCOSC and reiterated the challenges the white paper posed.  The committee had been effective and if its ability to scrutinise the NHS was taken away, it would be a poorer service for it. 

He thanked Councillor Hall for her update and looked forward to receiving further updates in the future.