Report from I.W. Councillor John Nicholson

Posted by Admin on 22 October 2020, 4:43 pm

COUNCILLOR JOHN NICHOLSON

Ward Member for Northwood & Cowes South
Chairman of Policy & Scrutiny Committee for Adult Social Care & Health

SUNNYSIDE

PALLANCE LANE

NORTHWOOD

PO31 8LT
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Tel: 07918 757843

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Email: cllr.john.nicholson@btconnect.com

See the I.W. Councillor’s section

WARD REPORT – OCTOBER 2020

The Report appearing in the November 2020 edition of Northwood News:

Why Partnerships Are A Win-Win for Our Local NHS

Isle of Wight NHS Trust recently published its new strategy for improving and securing healthcare services for the long term. A key part of the strategy is partnerships – both on the Island and with colleagues across the Solent. Our NHS Trust has already announced partnerships covering hospital-based services (acute), mental health and learning disabilities and ambulance services.

Taking hospital-based services as an example, the advances in modern technology and specialisation require a different environment to the traditional one that many of us grew up in, where the knowledge bank, skills and peer review group was more stayed and less complex. Today, where ready and fluid information and review is a necessity for safe implementation of modern processes and understandings, a far greater resource pool is required. A small isolated hospital (or other service, come to that) is not of a scale that can hold or sustain such resource requirements on its own. This disadvantage is made even greater when that hospital is a general hospital trying to serve its community with a wide and full range of department services – it is just not possible, and can even become dangerous.

In practical terms, maintaining true independence on such a small scale inhibits the calibre of applicant for senior posts and thereby skill sets and levels. Such essential professional resources such as peer reviews are also inhibited because there just are not the numbers or competence levels for this to happen effectively. The result is that when patients need more skilled and specialist treatments they have to be sent to the mainland and put in the charge of that independent service, which, in turn causes issues in synchronising with the local services for less skilled and less demanding yet equally important care, as many residents have illustrated to me in their representations of the adverse experiences they have been subjected to.

Associating with Portsmouth yet maintaining independence on both sides is a win-win situation, as it gives Portsmouth the access to the rural environment that it needs to obtain university status. For the Island, it greatly multiplies our skills resource, and everything that goes with that, including calibre of senior specialist staff, peer review and access to technology and latest medical processes at a scale that simply could not be achieved on our own. The arrangement allows staff to be rotated, skills to be drawn on at need and, for the patient, more, better and safer levels of treatments to be available at home, on the Island, and for those that still need to be shipped off to the mainland, better synchronisation of care.

In practical terms, many will already have seen Portsmouth-headed clinics being run at St Mary’s, new faces, skills levels and greater resources being engaged in their diagnosis and treatments and a streamlining of better care services that brings greater efficiency and better results. This message needs to be understood and shared.

Illegal Vehicles

Untaxed, uninsured and non-MOT’d vehicles are not just a nuisance in parking; recent investigatory evidence suggests that they are commonly used on the road by criminals, maybe because if they are not registered legally, it is more difficult to trace the user. Please report any vehicles that you observe to Island Roads (via their report it online webpage), the Police and do copy me and the Parish Council in, so we can chase progress.

Place Plan Update

Thank you to those who have given feedback opinion to the developing Northwood and Cowed Place Plan. This is our Plan and your input matters. For those that haven’t yet given feedback opinion, the survey will run for some time yet, so please do so when you can – https://arc-consulting.co.uk/cn-place-plan/.

What the survey is telling us so far is that Cowes and Northwood hold very similar values and are quite different to Ryde and Newport. In Northwood and Cowes people are more content with where they live, and don’t really want things to change; we pretty well like it how it is. However, we are sat on a unique wealth of history, heritage and culture, and we don’t make enough of this because, I guess, we take it for granted; the Place Plan will bring this out.

Developing our Place Plan will, I am sure, be a very exciting journey, and I am so pleased that ARC Consulting are now able to start progressing our Place Plan – please join in.

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John Nicholson

Ward Councillor for Northwood & Cowes South
Chairman, Policy and Scrutiny Committee for Adult Social Care & Health

See the I.W. Councillor’s section