Health and Community Services medical director Dr Patrick Armstrong and Dr Anuschka Muller, the department’s director of improvement and innovation, admitted that mistakes had been made when communicating with patients about the postponement of operations at the Hospital, after all but urgent and emergency surgery had to be cancelled earlier this month.
However, they said they did not share the view that the Hospital was in the ‘emergency state’ described by senior hospital doctors who raised concerns with the JEP last week about low staff morale, difficulties over staff recruitment and retention, and a disconnect with management.
Meanwhile, a former radiographer at the hospital and a GP have both written to the JEP, with the former saying she was relieved that the ‘critical situation’ at the hospital had ‘at last been disclosed’, and the latter saying consultant colleagues had ‘clearly had enough’.
Dr Armstrong said that he wanted to repeat his apology to Islanders – some of whom were his own patients – for the postponement of surgery which he said was due to a combination of seasonal pressures, staff vacancies and the effects of Covid-19.
‘We won’t get it right every time and the last couple of weeks have shown that there are aspects where we did not get it right, in particular communicating with our patients in a timely manner, but I would like to think that the public would think it only fair that when we make a mistake, we get the chance to learn,’ Dr Armstrong said.
Responding to the concerns raised by clinicians, Dr Armstrong and Dr Muller said that the service was committed to using information within the integrated performance report, parts of which will now be published next month, to improve services provided to Islanders.
The report, which contains a range of performance data submitted from across the service, allows services in Jersey to be benchmarked with those provided in several other jurisdictions, including UK health authorities.
They accepted that the decision to publish the material next month, rather than next year as had previously been indicated, reflected the extent of public interest in the information following recent criticism in the media. But they said that it was important the content was robust and that they were in a position to respond to questions about it from medical professionals, as well as from the wider public.
‘We were always keen to publish the report and we are working towards it,’ Dr Muller said. ‘The key is that what is basically a table with figures in it needs some explanation. It makes sense to clinical professionals but it doesn’t necessarily easily explain [itself] to the public so we want to put a narrative around it so that it’s easily understandable,’ she added.
Dr Armstrong said that he accepted that the pressures on the Hospital’s operating theatre related to historical issues which had been going on for some time – and were exacerbated by factors outside the Island – but he said the department was committed to making things better, both by securing additional staff and by smarter management of operating-theatre lists.
Managers now expect normal timetables for operations to be restored at the end of August, they said, so that patients advised last week of the postponement of surgery might expect to have their operations in September.
Although Dr Armstrong, whose role straddles the Hospital’s executive and its clinical functions, accepted that staff morale was at present ‘mixed’ – something he attributed in part to the introduction of governance and assurance frameworks – he said they were using the Be Heard government staff survey to locate areas of the service where it was low and work to improve it.
