The letter to Wes Streeting highlights the severe financial challenges faced by the local Integrated Care Board (ICB), the strain on GP services, and the broader healthcare infrastructure issues that affect residents, particularly in light of ongoing housing developments.
While welcoming the Labour Government’s commitment to the NHS and promises of a new hospital in Basingstoke, the council leaders asked Mr Streeting to consider the pressing need for investment in primary care services to address long waiting times, inaccessible GP practices, and the increasing burden on overstretched healthcare professionals.
The letter also called for detailed plans to ensure adequate recruitment and funding for local health services to meet the needs of the growing community.
The council leaders say that while the quality of care remains high when accessed, the system is failing too many residents.
They also urged the government to take immediate action to resolve the primary care crisis and reaffirm the role of local government as a critical partner in achieving meaningful healthcare reform.
Here is the full transcript of the letter:
Dear Mr Streeting
We are writing this open letter to you, as the two Leaders of Basingstoke and Deane Borough Council, sharing it with residents and councillors, as well as our localMPs.
The investment announced in the budget for the NHS is welcomed, as is the clear intent set out by the Government to address the challenges we see in the NHS as a priority.
We know, more than any other issue and there are many in our community, that access to quality healthcare is a concern shared by all residents. You have inherited the current situation and the previous government should hang their heads in shame for what they have done to the NHS.You will be aware of the proposals for a new hospital in Basingstoke, and the promises made by Sir Kier Starmer to the people of Basingstoke when he stood in our high street during the general election. A promise that was warmly welcomed. We look forward to working with the new Labour Government to deliver that promise.The purpose of this letter is to highlight our local crisis in primary care and the difficult position faced by the local Integrated Care Board. We have had positive and constructive engagement with the ICB, but they face a dire financial situation.
The Government cannot expect us to build thousands of new houses without the infrastructure to go with them, and the lack of primary care funding is causing an ever deeper crisis where existing services cannot cope and new services are beyond the financial means of the ICB to fund. This then undermines the delivery of primary care to communities in most need.One of our greatest challenges is the geography of primary practices. Residents are forced to travel sometimes on two buses to access a surgery on the other side of town, not ideal when you are feeling ill or have children who are ill. For people on low incomes this becomes a problem when it’s costing them to travel across town to access health care, let alone the fact that we have a poor bus network to begin with.
The GPs themselves are stretched to deliver the services they do and so in recent years we have seen mergers into bigger and more remote practices. Bigger enterprises such as Operose have then won contracts and struggled to deliver services to the standard needed.
Despite good GPs and healthcare professionals at the ICB and local surgeries doing everything they can to manage the system it is very clearly broken. Resident waiting times are an issue, and getting to see a GP let alone an Advanced Nurse Practitioner or other healthcare professional is so hard. You call at 8am and find that 100 other people are waiting on the line, only for the phone to disconnect. Or you might be lucky and find that you are number 30 in the queue and get an appointment sometime in the next couple of weeks. Not everyone can use the available online platforms which are notoriously unreliable and clumsy, especially when dealing with complex situations that need a face to face appointment. Indeed some surgeries are only accessible online.
The care you get once you get past the gatekeeping systems and actually when you see a doctor or a practitioner is superb. The quality of care in our NHS remains good. There are cases that are falling through the gaps in the system, serious cases, but these are often because of the time it takes to get to see someone in the first place.Cancer care is amazing, but the current system is not good enough and so cancer patients do need a better service.
We raise these issues because people in Basingstoke need the new Labour Government to fix primary care as much as deliver a new hospital – these two essential areas are linked. We could also raise the issue of palliative care and struggle our hospices face, or the crisis of social care that is bankrupting many Councils, or the issue of a severe lack of NHS dentists, but that only emphasises the system wide crisis we see. We haven’t even touched on mental health services, or the health implications of food poverty as areas of deep concern to the well-being of our local communities.As a Borough Council we do all we can to support our public sector partners, often the broker to bring public and private sector together to seek resolutions to the problems we face. We punch far above our weight as a Borough Council in order that we meet the expectations of our residents and when Government talks of reform and reorganisation it needs to be very careful it doesn’t undermine its own agenda by damaging a key sector of Local Government that is actually delivering, District Councils are one of your greatest allies in this agenda.
Can you please offer us some reassurance that the Government has detailed plans to restore our primary care sector, and that we can look forward to our ICB being made solvent, and that we can have confidence that primary care services will see investment to enable the recruitment of doctors and nurses as well as other staff?
There is so much to address and all of it is critical to the well-being of our community. One of our key areas of work is addressing poverty. There are real concerns at the impact of poverty on health outcomes and we believe a whole system approach can enable and empower partners to deliver services and interventions that will be greater than the sum of their parts. We believe that prevention can make a genuine difference to people.
So in writing to you today, we want to highlight the willingness of Local Government to play our part in working in partnership, but also to emphasise the deep concern residents have about the future of primary care in particular and the health service more widely.
Yours sincerely,
Councillor Paul Harvey, leader of the council, and Councillor Gavin James, co-leader