By Seaton county councilor Martin Shaw

Colyford residents Carole and Mike Wickens, who have both been involved in 'care in the community', have launched a petition on the government website to restore in-patient beds in community hospitals like Seaton, from which they were removed in 2017.

The coronavirus crisis has brought the role of our hospitals back into the spotlight. In March, aware that Seaton Hospital has had empty space since in-patient beds were removed in 2017, Councillor Jack Rowland, chairman of Seaton Area Health Matters, suggested to the Devon NHS that they might use it to meet the extra demands of the crisis.

In turns out that the same month, 25,000 patients across the country, including many in Devon, were discharged into care homes without being tested for COVID-19.

Two months later, almost twenty thousand care home patients were estimated to have died. In Devon care home deaths make up half of all COVID-19 deaths, including almost all of the 20 in the Axe Valley. The March discharges are now accepted as a factor in causing this.

What is the connection between this situation and community hospitals? Well, by using the empty space in one or more of the hospitals, the NHS could have kept the patients they needed to discharge from the RD&E and other acute hospitals in a nurse-staffed ward, without exposing vulnerable care home residents. But, following Government and NHS England advice, the opportunity to keep them separate was missed.

As we face a possible second wave of the virus, testing, PPE and quarantining are much better organised, but we know that - especially with asymptomatic carriers of COVID - testing can be unreliable. Since acute hospitals are risky environments, it would still be better to discharge patients into a dedicated facility, separate from care homes.

Looking at the situation more broadly, we need a far-ranging examination of how we can make best use of the community hospital system, which local communities thankfully saved from being broken up after the bed closures. The obsession with reducing bed numbers which drove policy a few years back has been badly shown up in the pandemic.

At the recent meeting of the Devon Health and Adult Care Scrutiny Committee, it was recognised that we need more localised provision in Devon's NHS. When the local NHS plan is revised following the pandemic, I shall be pressing for the community hospitals to be fully used.