Agenda item - Chair's Communications

10.1    The Chair gave the following communications:

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to this afternoon’s meeting. Please bear with me if I make any mistakes today, since this is my first time as Chair of this committee.  Technically I’m a new member of HOSC as well, since I left briefly at the end of the last municipal year – which meant I actually only missed the July meeting. We also have a couple of departing members from HOSC, namely Councillor Jacqui O’Quinn and Councillor Elaine Hills, and I’d like to send our thanks to them for their input in past meetings and overall service to this body.

To replace them, we welcome Councillor Pete West and Councillor Gary Wilkinson – or we would welcome Gary, if he hadn’t been called away and needed a sub at short notice – so, a hearty welcome to Pete, to Gill Williams, subbing for Gary today, and to Alex Phillips, subbing for Steph Powell.

Obviously, the health picture both locally and nationally remains of grave and increasing concern, and I’d like to once again give heartfelt thanks to the professionals taking the time both to produce the reports we will be discussing today and to attend this meeting to present them to us.

I’d also like to give heartfelt thanks to everyone who works in either the NHS or in social care for their commitment and sacrifice – the unprecedented situation that has unfolded over the last seven or eight months can’t have been easy. Our already overstretched NHS has been further stretched to the absolute limits of endurance. Many healthcare workers have been ill themselves, far too many have died, many have been left traumatised, and with numbers rising steeply again, it is becoming harder to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

That workers at all levels continue to give their all, going above and beyond in so many cases to give exceptional service despite their own exhaustion and understandable fear, is incredibly inspiring.  They know that the NHS must try, within extremely squeezed resources, to cope not only with the second wave of Covid, but with reinstating the many services that were affected by the first wave, and trying to get back as close to normality as possible, with winter on its way. They deserve as much support and gratitude as we can give them.

B&H has been relatively lightly hit to date – although that relatively still includes far too many people falling ill and too many people dying. But we know numbers are rising locally - indeed, have doubled in the last week - and it looks like it’s going to be a tough winter ahead. Even though we recognise that NHS and social care staff are busy and are going to be even busier, the HOSC has an important role to play in helping the public understand how the system is planning to fight Covid whilst maintaining crucial non-Covid services. And maybe that we will be particularly focused on what is being done to protect our most vulnerable communities through all of this – whether that’s BAME Communities at greater risk from Covid; people with serious health conditions like cancer who desperately need timely access to treatments; or older people and people from our most deprived communities who may struggle to access services digitally.