South Yorkshire NHS plan ‘aims to help people live healthier, happier lives’

A meeting of the South Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire joint health overview and scrutiny committee, held at Sheffield Town Hall on Wednesday, August 23, discussed the NHS Five Year Joint Forward Plan for South Yorkshire. The meeting brought together councillors from the region with leaders of South Yorkshire NHS Integrated Care Board, who are one of the main bodies running local health services.

Read the plan at https://southyorkshire.icb.nhs.uk/about-us/our-structure/five-year-joint-forward-plan

Will Cleary-Grey, the NHS board’s executive director, strategy and partnerships, said the plan has been “absolutely based on the needs of our communities”. His colleague Marianna Hargreaves said that public consultation has helped to shape the plan and a key aim is to help people live a happier, healthier life for longer.

In total, 2,500 people have responded to public consultation that took place in various ways, including working with the campaign group Healthwatch in Sheffield, Barnsley and Doncaster and Voluntary Action Rotherham to reach seldom-heard communities.

Issues that most people mentioned involved lack of access to GP appointments and other health services, affordability of transport, parking, medication and treatment and patients’ need to be more in control of their own healthcare.

‘Gap in inequalities’

As previously reported, one major issue the plan addresses is the life expectancy gap between richer and poorer areas.

NHS research shows that male life expectancy is 77.3 years, lower than 78.7 years across England. Female life expectancy is 80.9 years, compared with 82.7 years nationally.The gap in life expectancy between the most and least deprived South Yorkshire areas is 8.7 years for males and 7.6 for females.

Ms Hargreaves said: “We know that people live shorter lives in South Yorkshire and longer in poorer health and that actually that some groups, sometimes described as health inclusion groups, fare particularly worse, and we need to focus on that, and the health status in South Yorkshire is not as good as it could be and that the gap in our inequalities is wider.”

She said that challenges the NHS faces locally include delays to A&E involving ambulance handovers, waiting lists, especially for mental health services and planned hospital treatment and care, and increasing demand for primary care such as GP services.

Part of the plan stresses the need for more preventive healthcare services in order to keep people healthier for longer.

Barnsley Coun Jeff Ennis said that social housing providers such as Berneslai Homes in his area and St Leger homes in Doncaster need to be included in the planning process. He said that they work with people who feel socially excluded and have a range of problems.

Coun Taiba Yasseen from Rotherham said the plan “talks about ambition but I don’t think ambition really came through. I am particularly focused around prevention so when I read the outcomes page I felt it more demonstrated how do we respond to rising demand and not how do we address the causes of the demand.

“That for me is where the ambition is. We lead today a sedentary lifestyle – the way way we live and work has fundamentally changed. Our healthcare system hasn’t really caught up with that.”

She said that getting people to move more and focusing on nutrition could help people cope with “the awfulness of how life has become” with more early deaths and more of us living with multiple health issues.

“The truth is unless we go to the causes of what is making us so ill, actually we’re not going to address it, because the demand is going to rise and the services, as we already know, can’t cope with that because of many other factors.”

Doncaster Coun Glynis Smith, who worked for many years as a learning disability nurse, spoke about the ‘voice of the vulnerable’ in the consultation process. She said she was worried that Healthwatch are not the best people to provide information that is easily understood by people who have learning disabilities, are elderly, confused or have dementia.

‘Leaky bucket’

She is also worried about those people who cannot cope with explaining their health issues over the phone.

Touching on the current NHS industrial action, committee chair Coun Ruth Milsom from Sheffield Council said: “There’s no point talking about anything to do with workforce unless people working in the system feel they can stay in the system, so if we’re constantly leaking because people are dissatisfied with their pay or working conditions it is a hiding to nothing, so it has to be addressed.

“We wait for a governmental response to all of this at the highest level but actually at a local level it’s a leaky bucket constantly.”

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Mr Cleary-Grey responded: “I would agree with you that fundamentally any workforce strategy has to focus on retaining what is essentially a valuable workforce. The NHS is its workforce, in many respects, and the people it serves.”

He said that the NHS is focusing on how to support its staff, including their health and well-being, but action impacts on the ability to deliver services, including coping with the backlog.

Prof Adam Layland of Yorkshire Ambulance Service said: “We have worked very closely with our trade union partners to mitigate that impact on patients locally and particularly the recognition is it’s not industrial action against us as an employer, as a Yorkshire Ambulance Service, but wider against the government and the NHS as a whole.

“What we have been able to do is put in some solid plans to ensure that our workforce are supported and protected in their right to take industrial action but also for them to recognise the impact that that has on patient care.

“The majority of the workforce that were taking part in industrial action were permitted by the unions to respond to certain categories of calls to our highest-priority patients and of course we then bolstered resources in different ways to support those lower-priority patients so that they got the best response that we were able to provide.”