Health system faces shake-up in Devon because of the pandemic

Seaton county councillor Martin Shaw reports on the recent Health Scrutiny meeting at County Hall:

Devon's health system is already changing because of the Covid-19 pandemic and will change further over the next year or so.

I've recently been appointed to the County Council's Health and Adult Care Scrutiny Committee, and at its June meeting I gained some impressions of where things are going.

The pandemic itself now appears to be at a very low level in Devon, with some days without any new reported cases, although there were still two care home outbreaks at the time of our meeting.

There are now very few Covid patients in the RD&E, so non-Covid care is returning to centre-stage. It is a sign of the times that the new Exeter Nightingale hospital is being repurposed for cancer screening.

However, Covid is still more widespread in the UK than other European countries, so the easing of lockdown means that it could easily return to Devon.

I gather the 'track, trace and isolate' system is finally beginning to work, but the NHS has got to be prepared for possible new spikes as well as trying to get the rest of the services back to normal.

It's acknowledged that waiting times for non-urgent operations - many of which were far too long even before the pandemic - have got much worse.

I asked for a plan to catch up on these, and was told it's being worked on.

The big positive for local NHS managers is that online and phone consultations with GPs and consultants seem to have mostly worked well. I can certainly see the benefits to many patients as well as the savings in doctors' time.

However, several local people contacted me about problems with online consultations, and I was able to feed that into the meeting.

I think that this big shift in the NHS way of working needs to be carefully monitored to make sure that people who aren't online and those who find the internet difficult aren't deterred from seeing doctors when they need to. I worry that the drop-off in demand for non-Covid treatments - even cancer - could have been affected by this.

In the medium term, the Devon NHS plan, on the verge of being adopted before the crisis, will need to be radically re-examined. I remain convinced we need to fully use our community hospitals, to provide more services nearer to where people live.