Agenda item - Chairs Communications

18.1    The Chair made the following comments:

Please accept my apologies in advance for the somewhat ‘tetchy’ nature of my Chairs Coms this afternoon – my frustration is very much NOT aimed at any member of this committee or council, or any member of the NHS or care provider either locally or nationally.

But I am frustrated, angry even. The life of this committee and this council, but more importantly the lives of NHS staff, carers and all other residents of our city and our country continue to be dominated by Covid 19.

It is restricting our freedoms, damaging our mental health and obviously threatening our physical health and our very lives, not to mention the abject devastation it is wreaking on the local and national economy.

It is, of course, the greatest health crisis in a century, and we are far from alone in experiencing it with, as far as I am aware, not a single country on the planet completely untouched.

However, we are right up there leading the world in the worst possible way: amongst a tiny handful of countries with deaths per million of over 900 – for contrast, those in Denmark are around 150, Norway less than 70, Germany around 240, and China, where the story began or was at least first identified, way behind on less than 4 per million, with total deaths amongst their vast population of less than 5000. The only countries ahead of us appear to be those – like Belgium, for instance - who are counting differently, in listing all excess deaths as Covid 19.

I’m sure everyone here joins me in hoping that the several vaccines now approved for use represent the huge shining hope that we might someday soon be able to return to some semblance of normality. I further hope that the mass vaccination programme is left to health professionals to administer in its entirety, and therefore not horribly bungled as our TTI efforts continue to be, through no fault of the professionals who should be running them, but aren’t.

Having got all that off my chest, I’ll come back to today’s agenda to say that it, too has been affected (which is what set me off in the first place) in as much as we cannot have the items we would like, in as much detail as we would like, since we recognize – and still very much appreciate and are grateful for – the fact that in the midst of this ongoing emergency everyone is too busy actively trying to provide services of all kinds to take up time to provide the kind of detailed answers to us that they normally would.

For example, we were hoping to have a report on dental services during this period at today’s HOSC. Healthwatch Brighton & Hove have been contacted by a number of local residents – as have I, and probably every other Councillor - who have found NHS dentistry to be difficult or impossible to access in recent months; and I had invited them to present these issues to the committee, with NHS England, the dental commissioners, responding. However, I’ve been told by NHS England that no one is available to join today’s call. After discussion with Healthwatch, I’ve reluctantly decided to postpone this item, and will be pressing NHSE England to attend the next HOSC.

I had also been hoping to be able to invite the Trust for Developing Communities to attend this meeting to present their recent report on the experiences of local BAME communities during the Covid crisis. Cllr Powell and I are both very keen for this to come to HOSC and agree that this is an important report that we should consider. However, I’ve been advised that it would be more useful to look at this report in the early new year when we can see both the report itself and responses from providers and commissioners – the latter are currently still being finalised.

 I was reluctant to delay all consideration of this issue until February though, and have consequently asked the CCG to update the HOSC today on the work they have been leading to assess and address the impact of Covid on local BAME communities. In a similar vein, I’ve also asked for an update on the additional pressures on mental health services because of Covid. This is another hugely important issue, and one that members may wish to explore in more depth at the next HOSC meeting.

I’ll finish by once again giving our heartfelt thanks to everyone providing reports to us today, even if they are not as thorough as they and we might prefer, and to all our NHS and care staff, medical and non-medical, working tirelessly for the wellbeing of us all.