Committee Reports Contained ‘Inaccuracies’

Health Minister Lawrie Hooper says that reports from the Health Services Consultative Committee contained several inaccuracies and that the committee was acting outside its remit.

This follows strong words from the former chair Andrew Cole who said that current members have told him that the minister had used intimidating behaviour, something he has refuted.

Speaking to Gef, Mr Hooper said: ‘If you go back a year, the first HSCC report that I received as Minister was last year and that report had a number of factual errors in it, I sat down with the with the committee at the time time and said, you can’t do this, if you’re going to publish reports, they’ve got to be accurate.

‘Be as critical as you like, but you’ve got to be accurate, you can’t publish stuff that’s not true. I assumed they had taken that on board and took it away with them.’

Despite this, Mr Hooper said that this year’s report contained similar inaccuracies.

Remit

Another issue is the remit of the committee, which Mr Cole said the remaining members had told him was being limited, with the HSCC cut out of meetings and restricted to what it could do.

Mr Hooper said: ‘They’re required to oversee quality, performance and activity of services delivered. That’s the language that’s used in the law.

‘I said to them, that’s what you need to do, so roll forward a year, and we see another report from them and it contains a significant number of factual errors, misrepresentations, a couple of things that are outright false, actually. One of the lines in the report is that they operate, that they’ve aligned themselves to report, is according to the way the mandate operates, and the transformation programme. They’ve said that this approach has ministerial support, they said on page 16 of the report, I can be absolutely candid about this, I wrote to them earlier this year, saying I think what you’re doing is unlawful, I don’t think you’re allowed to do this, that is definitely not ministerial support.’

Feedback

Mr Hooper said that when he asked for feedback on issues around primary care, the HSCC board was unable to provide this. He added that be believes the committee had become concerned primarily with legislation rather than the patient experience, which is what has become the focus of the proposed changes to the remit of the HSCC.

Funding

One area that Mr Hooper did agree with Mr Cole was that the island’s healthcare system needs more funding, but he wants to see a long-term funding model.