This forum designed to help people understand the implications of FL. WHAT HAPPENS TO THE IOW HOSPITAL? I received this today from an IOW hospital employee, who for obvious reasons would prefer not to be named. Draw your own conclusions: Hi Carl, was good to speak to on the phone yesterday. As far as the hospital and health service are concerned, this is what I think will happen without/ with a fixed link. None of this is definite but what I think is most likely. WITHOUT FL. Currently health services are expensive and sometimes difficult to provide here for a number of reasons: difficulty recruiting staff, needing to buy in services from other hospitals.....e.g. heart surgery, brain surgery, heart attack treatment, childrens ICU etc. When consultants in these specialties visit the IOW, we have to pay them for their travelling time meaning they spend less time with island patients for the cost and when we transfer patients to mainland hospitals the NHS pays and thats expensive by helicopter. Also we suffer from diseconomies of scale. Until recently, all of this was absorbed by the unique way that health services worked on the island but this arrangement is now ending and in the current harsh financial environment it is becoming obvious that our services are costlier than elsewhere which means that soon we could become financially non-viable. There is a danger that we could become a failing hospital with all that this entails (try recruiting to one of those!). Any services that are expensive and can be provided elsewhere (or can just be cut altogether) may have to be. The hospital could be taken over either by another Trust e.g. Southampton (and wed probably be treated as a poor cousin) or by a private enterprise e.g. Virgin Healthcare, Blue Circle etc. I think all this could well happen within 5 years unless something really happens to change things. I would not want to be a patient here with all this going on thats for sure. WITH FL. If there is a fixed link, the hospital will probably cease to be a general hospital as I dont think we would really need it in its current form. Im not sure whether there would be a basic A/E for triage and dispatch or whether anything that was not a simple minor injury or GP type problem would just go straight to Southampton. I believe our local hospital would just become Southampton although it is possible that some of Southamptons work would take place in current buildings on the Island which would be easy and not too inefficient to arrange with a fixed link (I imagine it would be Southampton as a teaching hospital rather than Portsmouth but maybe that shouldnt be taken for granted and might depend where a fixed link came out). The economies of scale would mean that some people would lose their jobs but there would probably be new opportunities for them with a FL too. However, most people would probably not lose their jobs as all the work would still be there and there are huge national shortages of many types of doctor and all types of nurse- no frontline staff would have any difficulty finding a job and would possibly have the additional options of Portsmouth, even Winchester/ Salisbury/ Bournemouth etc to work at. They probably wouldnt mind travelling depending on how the link works and how much it costs whereas at the moment, getting to Southampton hospital from the IOW is a real challenge and I would really not want to have to commute there with current travel options. Recruitment would be easier as you would be recruiting to a large teaching hospital which does some work on an adjacent peninsula and not to a small island hospital. For a patient, I really think this could be an improvement as some services would be available on the island and the rest would be a short road journey away, just like it is in the rest of the country. There will still be all the financial pressures that are coming but our local hospital would be a state of the art teaching hospital with all the attendant benefits.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Nov 2014 20:46:28 +0000
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