NHS Lanarkshire is moving to protect essential services as pressure on health and social care services hits historic levels.
While we are seeing lower levels of serious illness as a result of the Omicron Covid-19 variant, there are a large number of cases as well as other winter illnesses and complex presentations.
There are also ongoing serious staff shortages across health and social care services. Hospital admissions are still rising and our community services are caring for a huge amount of people with Covid-19, who require our services but do not need admitted to hospital.
Our services – whether delivered by independent contractors, the Health and Social Care Partnerships or the Acute Directorate – are experiencing more pressure that at any other point.
Under the circumstances the only way we can preserve our never services – the ones we would never wish to stop – is by making difficult decisions on prioritising the use of staff across health and social care.
This unfortunately means pausing or reducing services in other areas to allow staff to be redeployed.
Each part of the organisation has been asked to identify their never services and is responsible for prioritising staffing to deliver these.
A new group has been set up as part of NHS Lanarkshire’s strategic command structure to help identify solutions where a service does not have sufficient staff to continue without additional support. The group will make recommendations to the existing Clinical Tactical Group which reports to the NHS Lanarkshire Strategic Command Group.
Where redeployment of staff to other areas is necessary, NHS Lanarkshire staff and manager redeployment guidance will be followed. Staff will only be redeployed to appropriate roles.
In addition, staffing support has been requested from other member organisations of the Lanarkshire Resilience Partnership. We are grateful to the local authorities, both of which have agreed to release staff to help.
Following agreement with the GP Sub Committee and Lanarkshire Local Medical Committee, we have written to GP practices to advise that they should move to a managed suspension of service.
GPs continue to deliver services, but the reduction in the managed services which support General Practice (e.g. treatment rooms and district nursing) reduces their ability to deliver all that they would wish. This means that they will be focussing on the most urgent and time critical cases including the assessment of people who are unwell with respiratory or Covid-19 symptoms.
Some community pharmacies may need to reduce their hours due to staffing pressures.
These actions are being taken reluctantly, and only because they are necessary due to the critical nature of the current situation and its impact across our services.
We realise many of our patients and staff are suffering the effects of these pressures on a daily basis.
Staff are asked to be aware that this is affecting all parts of the system. More than ever it is important not to promise what level of care other parts of the service may be able to provide and try to manage expectations as far as possible.
Our aim is return services to normal as soon as is possible. Cases of Omicron are expected to peak soon. In the meantime, we are also working hard to address staffing shortfalls through recruitment and the staff bank.
Strategic Command will continue to monitor the situation daily and ensure the actions we are taking allow us to preserve our never services during this period of pressure and recover at the earliest opportunity.
We would like to take the opportunity to remind you of the health and wellbeing support that is available to all health and social care staff across Lanarkshire.
Information on the support that is available to you can be found on the ‘Your Health Matters’ web hub at https://www.nhslanarkshire.scot.nhs.uk/your-health-matters/
Thank you for your continuing professionalism and dedication during these challenging times.
NHS Lanarkshire Strategic Command Group
