A new five-year plan for health care has been described as “idealistic” by an independent health watchdog.
Healthwatch Brighton and Hove chief executive Alan Boyd spoke out during a special meeting of Brighton and Hove City Council’s Health and Wellbeing Board.
The board, which includes representatives from the council, NHS and community organisations, met to discuss the “Sussex Shared Delivery Plan”.
The plan – the Sussex Integrated Care Strategy – was drawn up by NHS Sussex and its partners and sets out local “ambitions and priorities”.
Each of the country’s 20 “integrated care systems” was required to create a plan by the end of this month, prompting the special meeting at Hove Town Hall yesterday (Wednesday 28 June).
Mr Boyd said: “I totally support the ambitiousness of the plan. Some of the targets … I wonder if they’re too ambitious. They’re not very realistic.
“I don’t want to be coming back in 12 months’ time because we haven’t delivered. There’s one thing – there’ll be no patients cared for in corridors in 12 months.
“Based on the system where we are now, I question whether we can get there in 12 months.
“I don’t want to fail. I am supportive of this plan but some of the targets seem a little bit idealistic.”
He added that the plan needed to be ambitious to tackle the backlog of 18,000 children waiting for referrals to children and adolescent mental health services (CAHMS) and adults waiting more than 31 days for mental health support.
NHS Sussex’s managing director for Brighton and Hove, Lola Banjoko, said that some targets were set nationally, including an end to caring for people in corridors.
She said: “Not caring for people in the corridors, that’s a national requirement. But not just that – it’s also good for the patients. We need to set ourselves that ambition.
“We are doing the work with our partners and the SPFT (Sussex Partnership Foundation Trust) and the County (the Royal Sussex County Hospital).
“There is a big piece of work in terms of what services we can put outside the hospital to ‘decompress’.”
The committee heard that the plan had five priorities in Brighton and Hove
- Children and young people
- Mental health
- Multiple long-term conditions
- Multiple compound needs
- Cancer
…
The meeting was told that the focus for the first year would be helping people with “multiple compound needs”.
The council’s adult social care boss Rob Persey said that “multiple compound needs” were when people experienced two elements of a national list of hardships – homelessness, rough sleeping, domestic abuse and/or violence, mental health issues, alcohol and drugs issues and being in the criminal justice system.
Mr Persey said that a dedicated team had started working with one case in December, adding: “Since January up to now, because they sorted out housing, they sorted out some of his life skills and support in the community, that person has not had a single visit to the acute hospital.”
He said that the benefits were not just financial but human too.
The plan is part of the “integrated working” arrangements required by the Health and Care Act 2022 which aims to bring together health services, councils and voluntary and community organisations as “integrated care systems”.
Health chiefs are expected to approve the plan at an NHS Sussex board meeting net Wednesday (5 July).
