We are working to ensure that children on the Isle of Wight are supported to get the best start in life that will lead to good health and wellbeing. This will provide the foundation to ensure they are able to achieve the best opportunities and keep as healthy and well as possible throughout their lives.
We want to ensure that families, individuals and communities are thriving and resilient with access to good jobs, affordable housing, leisure activities, lifelong training, education and learning, health and care services are are able to enjoy the place in which they live.
We want to ensure that people on the Isle of Wight are able to live independently in their own homes with appropriate care support. We want to make sure older residents are supported to play an active role in their communities and supported to maintain and develop their social and community networks.
We started by talking to clinicians working in the acute (hospital-based) services, extensively reviewing data and looking in depth at the full range of challenges and opportunities facing each service including: Acute Medicine; Urology; Anaesthetics; ENT (ear, nose and throat surgery), Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Paediatrics, Orthopaedics, Radiology, General Surgery, Specialist Medicine, Ophthalmology and Haematology.
We talked to clinicians in partner organisations including Southampton and Portsmouth hospital trusts and to regional bodies like Wessex Strategic Clinical Senate and our national regulators NHS England and NHS Improvement.
We involved patient representatives in these discussions wherever we could and reviewed any existing patient feedback about these services. We also held over 50 different meetings with community groups to discuss some of the likely scenarios so that we had an appreciation of initial public thoughts and concerns.
One of the key issues raised by community stakeholders were concerns about the impact of travel off the Island. As a result, an initial travel impact assessment was carried out to establish the number of patients who might be affected because of the different solutions put forward, including number of journeys, costs and the time needed to make any additional journeys.
We also talked to staff to get initial feedback and our workforce group was closely involved in reviewing the different options to look at the potential impact on the workforce. We also set up a finance group to look at the financial impact of each option.
