Health appointment fears voiced by Leighton Buzzard pressure group

David Messum, from the Leighton Linslade health provision group, told Central Bedfordshire Council's social care, health and housing overview and scrutiny committee: 'Today marks the second anniversary of my request for full patient data sets that qualify which patients go where and for what treatments. 'How the ICB delivers primary care to a town is something CBC should have established for itself, given the discrepancy of the hundreds of millions spent on health infrastructure in Luton and Milton Keynes, compared to the tens of millions in Central Bedfordshire during the past ten years,' he explained. 'The ICB is always asserting it has good data for making future decisions to justify that Leighton Buzzard only requires 56,000 more appointments for the next ten years. We fear that's for estimated population growth and not key factors, such as young or elderly demographics. 'We asked in May for data showing how the extra rooms at the clinic were starting to benefit the town's primary care. There've been significant changes in these trends compared to the previous two years. 'Outpatient visits have improved miraculously by 19.5 per cent, mental health contacts have declined by 33 per cent and community contacts have doubled. But there are multiple locations. Are some or most of these outside the town? 'We don't know because the ICB practice is constantly to defer and deflect, rather than analyse and question, because it doesn't have the data or the answers don't conform to its narrative. 'You acknowledge you can't record all room use, but it was expedient to widely publicise 56,000 extra appointments when under criticism from our campaign and local councillors last year. 'Now the estimates and averages identify 11,000 to 12,000 extra appointments, about a three per cent improvement for our primary care. The ICB wishes to end further discussion or reporting of our town. 'This is 'a wake up and smell the coffee moment' for councillors, the executive and residents about the level of transparency to ICB decision-making and provision of standard dashboards of information.' The ICB's associate director of system and estates Nikki Barnes replied: 'We've been honest about some of the shortcomings around the information we hold, where we're dependent on national data bases and where there are data quality challenges from some of our providers.' She said the ICB had responded 'openly and transparently' to the best of its ability to multiple requests for data from the group. 'We've prepared a report about the first 12 months of use of the seven extra clinical rooms we made available in Leighton Buzzard last summer. We're trying to be fully open and transparent about the position, during a time which has seen three organisations merge into one and ICB headcount halved,' she said. 'We've worked really hard with our partners to continue to provide better access to care. This has involved estates improvements, as well as widening use of Pharmacy First and increasing use of the NHS App, while also supporting more traditional routes of access to primary care. 'We've published all the information we can around the neighbourhood health centre submission on the ICB's website. This includes the 56 proposals across our ICB footprint, with seven specifically for Central Bedfordshire. 'NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care are preparing a national review of neighbourhood health centre proposals. Decisions on which schemes will be supported haven't been made yet. 'Until the process is completed, it would be inappropriate to comment on individual proposals or provide extra information. Any updates need to be accurate, consistent and aligned with national announcements,' she added. 'Once the national review has concluded and decisions confirmed, we'll provide a full briefing on the implications for Central East and the next steps for the programme.'