The Isle of Wight Save Our NHS Group have been in touch to say that questions they’ve asked of the Isle of Wight NHS Trust Board have remained unanswered for six weeks.
They told OnTheWight,
“We’re really concerned about the future of St Mary’s Hospital as we believe it may be downgraded as part of the Sustainability and Transformation Plan (read more on IW/Hampshire STP). If that happened, the land would be sold off under the recommendations of The Naylor Report.
“We don’t feel the public are aware of the potential changes and are not getting enough information from the IW NHS Trust. At the 18th July IW NHS AGM, one of our members asked questions (see below) about the STP programme.”
Long wait for answers
The member was told that as they’d submitted their question on the morning of the meeting, it would not receive a reply that day. They were told the board needed 48 hours notice to be able to answer questions at the AGM.
Despite receiving an email saying “they [the NHS] are looking into it”, the group member says they’re still waiting for an answer to their question.
They added,
“We believe not enough information is being put out into the public domain for people to understand what is going on with their health service.”
Questions posed to NHS Trust Board
As well as the question below, the group member asked who would pay the costs and how long for if services were to moved to the mainland.
A widely accepted model for measuring the quality of health care in the NHS is the ‘six dimensions of quality’ originally attributed to Maxwell:
Access
Equity
Appropriateness
Acceptability
Efficiency
EffectivenessThe Isle of Wight Save Our NHS group believes that NHS England, through the STPs, are moving too far towards a ‘value based’ model of quality that delivers ‘health care episodes’ to patients defined by a contract, instead of a ‘patient-based’ model that delivers compassionate care defined by people’s individual health needs in the local setting.
Would the Board agree that the Hampshire & Isle of Wight Sustainability and Transformation Plan rebalances the local NHS too far towards efficiency at the expense of accessibility and appropriateness of the service, and this will have a disproportionately large impact on the Isle of Wight NHS because of its smaller size and insular location?
How will the Board ensure that equity of health service provision in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight continues to meet the health needs of Island residents in line with the broader determinants of health.
At the time of publishing the Isle of Wight Save Our NHS Group had still not received answers to their questions.
