Issue - meetings

Councillor B. T. Cooper, Bromsgrove District Council’s representative on the Worcestershire Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee (HOSC), provided an update on the latest meeting of the Committee.

Members were advised that during the meeting, on 8th October, the Committee had received an update on the Community Service Development programme.  The Worcestershire Health and Care Trust had reviewed community health services and concluded that the centralisation of services was required in order to respond to the needs of local people.  This conclusion had been mainly reached as a result of considering information about local demographics.  However, services would continue to be made available to people in their own homes in cases where they were likely to struggle to access services at a central location.

The Committee had also considered further information about Personal Health Budgets, which were provided to patients with long-term health conditions and disabilities.  Patients with Personal Health Budgets could choose which services they wanted to access in order to meet their needs.  The scheme had originally been piloted but was due to be extended to all eligible patients.

There had been a discussion of Redditch and Bromsgrove Clinical Commissioning Group’s response to the Acute Hospital Services Review, which was currently the subject of a consultation process.  It had been reported during the meeting that there were some concerns that changes would be made to service provision locally during the course of the consultation.  For this reason a working Committee had been established to assess action at the local level and to ensure that changes were not made to services during the consultation period.

Incontinence pads had been raised by Councillor Cooper as requested by the Board.  There had been concerns during the summer that there were plans for patients to be charged for incontinence pads.  However, no decision appeared to have been made as to whether to charge for incontinence pads and therefore it no further action appeared to be required.

Councillor Copper also clarified the role of HOSC.  Members were advised that HOSC was one of Worcestershire County Council’s scrutiny Committees.  In the early 2000s the Government had required local authorities (the county Council in a two-tier authority area) to establish a HOSC in order to scrutinise changes to the local health environment and the potential impact of any proposed changes in the local community.  The Worcestershire HOSC also was responsible for ensuring that any significant changes to services were subject to public consultation.  In extreme circumstances where HOSC had major reservations about a particular issue they could refer the matter to the Secretary of State for Health.  The HOSC had no direct working relationship with NHS England, though the role of HOSCs was due to change in response to the changing health environment.