He said a key priority for his committee this term was to develop a sustainable health and care system, with a review of the system\u2019s delivery and funding set to take place.<\/p>\n
This would include reviews of services that might be most effectively delivered by primary care, a review of medicines and the role of community pharmacies, a review of the secondary healthcare contract, and consideration of which services could be delivered most effectively by commissioning from the third sector.<\/p>\n
Deputy Oswald said the \u2018burdening cost\u2019 of health and care dominated discussion within the States, particularly in the Treasury.<\/p>\n
HSC acknowledged savings needed to be made, he said, and work was being done to reduce expenditure. Where possible, major patient operations were being carried out on-island, and a revision joint replacement scheme that used to be handled in Exeter was now being managed locally.<\/p>\n
However, significant challenges were still being contended with, he said.<\/p>\n
\u2018We have forecast the next rise in Health & Social Care budget year-on-year, if we do not change the way we deliver services, the figure that needs to be mitigated varies between \u00a36m. and \u00a38m. of extra resources required per annum,\u2019 Deputy Oswald said.<\/p>\n
He said approximately 60% of the net healthcare budget was spent on staffing costs, and attention had therefore been focused on reducing the use of \u2018expensive\u2019 agency staff.<\/p>\n
Spend on such staff had \u2018substantially declined\u2019 in recent years, from approximately \u00a316m. in 2023 to \u00a312m. in 2024, with a further reduction of almost \u00a33m. forecast for this year.<\/p>\n
But Deputy Oswald said some service areas remained hard to recruit for, and the use of agency staff was still considerable in these areas. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"He said a key priority for his committee this term was to develop a sustainable health and care…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":287341,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[102,2960,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-287340","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-healthcare","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=287340"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287340\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/287341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=287340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=287340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=287340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}