Re-imagining Health post-COVID19 - Cllr Adam Gannon
The Covid-19 Pandemic has shaken our society to its core and completely changed our way of life. It is a surreal and scary time to live in but eventually this time will pass, and we will enter a new post Covid era. While we strive protect lives today and minimise the impact of this terrible virus, we must also look to the future, to reform, rebuild and renew when this storm passes.
SDLP Youth activists and elected representatives will be writing about their ideas for a new era in the coming weeks and months on a wide range of topics. It is my pleasure as Chair of SDLP Youth to write the first of these.
£5.7 billion was allocated to the Department of Health in 2019-20, almost half of all departmental spending. Health is by far the biggest area of spend in Northern Ireland. The North also has the highest per person spend on health within the UK, yet we have almost 300,000 people on waiting lists, 100 times more than England which has a population 30 times the size of ours. And the wait isn’t short either, many will have to wait years to see a doctor. Waiting lists show no signs of reducing anytime soon.
The Covid-19 Pandemic has also exposed flaws within our health system. In the 3 months since the first case was diagnosed, we have only managed to have 3 test centres operational and can only achieve 2000 daily tests after 3 months of ramping up testing, well below targets. We find ourselves in a situation were the Department refuses to test some care home staff. This demonstrates how poor decision making is and slow the department is to react to a new situation.
The inadequate response to Covid-19, the waiting lists and finances paint a rather gloomy picture, but it can be better than this. Radical change to how healthcare is delivered across Northern Ireland is needed.
Changes need to be made and we must create a balance between the centralisation of services in regional centres of excellence and ensuring that our rural communities are able to access care, particularly emergency care, in a comprehensive and timely way.
Centres of excellence are essentially specialist clinics where expert health professionals are brought together to provide the very best care and treatment for patients affected by specific conditions. With different centres for different conditions. They will reduce waiting lists and improve the quality of service we receive but there is no reason why all these centres must be based in Belfast or Derry. Some of these centres should be based in rural hospitals, such as the South West Acute Hospital in Enniskillen to name just one, this will ensure a more equitable distribution of services.
It is well known that there are too many acute hospitals in Northern Ireland but with acute services, in particular, the patient needs to be seen quickly. We need to ensure that our acute hospitals are distributed on a geographic basis, ensuring everyone has access to healthcare. Some of our hospitals have a large overlap in catchment areas and they provide an excellent opportunity to optimise services in these areas.
Healthcare is about more than hospitals though. GPs, homecare and pharmacies are at the frontline of looking after the population and we must find ways to improve these services. The number of doctors being trained needs to massively increase to address the ongoing GP shortage and the recently announced medical school at Magee will help with this. In addition to this, newer doctors are not being attracted into General Practice due in part to the large workload associated with running a practice. The future is for GPs to be brought directly under health service management removing the burden of managing a practice and giving doctors more freedom within their career.
Pharmacies are an underutilised resource. Many individuals could receive timelier and more appropriate care in their local pharmacy rather than waiting weeks for a GP appointment or going to A&E. If there was comprehensive education on where to go for what, we could relieve pressures on vital services whilst providing faster and better care within the community.
There is also a need to remove inefficiencies within the health service. We currently have 5 trusts whilst areas of a similar population in England have a single trust, can we really justify the cost of 5 different management boards? If the health and social care followed the route of our education and library boards and merged into one Health and Social Care Board it would allow for better planning on a regional level and allow for initiatives such as a cap on locum pay, which is another blackhole for health funding.
Health is a very broad area and these are just a few ideas of how we can reshape our health service to deliver better care for everyone. Ultimately, a lot of change is needed to improve healthcare and it requires long-term creative solutions. I believe it is possible to have a world-class health service here that delivers for every single person in Northern Ireland we just need to begin the work now.
Cllr Adam Gannon
