Stockport NHS services seek public’s views on reopening services

Stockport NHS services are asking for public views on how to reopen services to offer the best possible service to the community, while ensuring public safety from the coronavirus.

The impact of the coronavirus has led to unprecedented changes for the NHS, with many routine services closed and healthcare professions transferred to cope with an influx of Covid-19 patients during the height of the pandemic.

Where services were able to continue, changes meant many consultations were carried out by phone or video. Where face-to-face appointments were necessary, fewer took place because of the need for deep cleaning of rooms between patients to keep everyone safe.

The NHS in Stockport is now preparing to reopen many of the services that were put on hold, however, lockdown has led to a sharp increase in demand for routine treatments, and the threat of infection from the virus has not disappeared.

Stockport Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) is now looking to hear the views of the public to help identify ways to ‘build back better’ after the peak of the crisis.

In a statement, Stockport CCG said:

We have to find a way to re-open services with your safety as our priority as well as creating a system that means our health professionals can see as many people as possible.

In other words, we need to build a better system than we had before the pandemic. Health and social care organisations in Stockport have got together to work out the best way in which to do this.

For instance, many of you have said that the phone and video consultations really worked for you so we plan to keep doing these to increase the number of people we can treat.

Others understandably struggled with these virtual consultations, so we are planning to increase the number of face-to-face appointments over the coming months to meet different needs.

We will use all the innovations that worked well during the pandemic and find solutions for things that didn’t go as well as we’d hoped.

If you have any thoughts on how we can build back better then please send them to: stockportccg.communications@nhs.net.