Issue - meetings

Matthew Cole, Director of Public Health, presented the report on the Quarter 2 performance and drew the Board’s attention to a number of issues including smoking cessation, A&E treatment and ambulance wait times, the cancer pathway and emergency admissions for ambulatory care sensitive conditions. 

The Board were advised by BHRUT that the recruitment issues in A&E could take five years to improve because of the high demand across the area.

Councillor Carpenter was concerned that the conception rate per 1,000 to women aged 15 to 17 was still above the national average.  Matthew Cole responded that the rate had reduced by 19% since its highest quarter reported, which had seen 38.2 conceptions per 1,000 teenage women, and was reducing steadily, however, a study would be commissioned in the New Year to find out why the Borough was lagging behind the national average and to consider the effect of the two year programme to reduce teenage pregnancies.  Marie Kearns commented that the teenage pregnancy rate had been an issue for the Borough for years, if not decades, and we needed to find out why that was still the case as there had been a number of campaigns aimed at reducing the rate.

There was discussion about the feedback from the BAD Youth Forum / Young Inspectors in regards to the alleged refusal of pharmacies to issue condoms or emergency contraception and insisting on age identification.  Matthew Cole advised that when problems about a specific pharmacy are reported to Public Health they would make contact with the Pharmacy concerned to make sure they fully understand and were complying with their contracts, including any staff training that may be required in the Pharmacy.  Matthew Cole advised that there would be a new and different way of providing condoms as part of the new Public Health contract provision for sexual health.  The provision of a card to enable young people to ask discreetly for contraception provision was also being looked into. 

Councillor Butt asked about other contraception provision in the area.  Matthew Cole advised that the services were commissioned from GPs and other specialist centres, there were a large number of emergency contraception provider, which were widespread across the Borough.  Councillor Butt gave an example of an inaccurate website and advised that she was also aware of two month waiting lists for contraception services appointments and felt these were unacceptable.  The Chair suggested that this type of information was passed to Matthew Cole so that effort could be given to resolving such problems.

Comments were made in regard to the Health and Adult Services Select Committee looking at sexual health services as an issue for in-depth scrutiny, due to the long standing teenage pregnancy rates and problems being reported with the provision of sexual health services in the Borough, but this would be dependent on its future scrutiny programme.

The Chair said that there had been a number of occasions where initiatives that worked well in other areas, with similar communities to  ...  view the full minutes text for item 73