Member of Staffordshire County Council representing Lichfield Rural East – Cabinet Member for Adults and Wellbeing

I learned so much I didn’t know when I met with their CEO and Deputy CEO this week…

The original St Giles Hospice is at Whittington near to Lichfield and there are also facilities in Walsall and Sutton Coldfield as well as community based services across the area.

I hadn’t realised exactly how St Giles Hospice had come about. I knew it began at the former St Giles Vicarage in Whittington but that was about it. 

In fact, in 1983, the then vicar, Reverend Canon Paul Brothwell, became concerned at the care available to terminally-ill patients in local hospitals and set about providing some beds in the vicarage for a few local people to be cared for in the most compassionate way possible.

Those early beginnings have grown into the modern St Giles Hospice we see today. The original principles remain unchanged and they now strive to offer specialist care in a variety of settings for patients with cancer or other serious illnesses, as well as providing support for their families and helpers.

It is the current scale and scope of their work which I was surprised about. I knew they are a major hospice service but hadn’t realised quite how big… one of the biggest in the country.

The ninety minutes I talked with Peter and Emma was immensely useful and a key element was around the need, and opportunity, for greater collaboration than ever before with NHS and Social Care services in Staffordshire.

Much of what we talked about sits very well with the ongoing work in Staffordshire to make the many different parts of the healthcare system here work and collaborate better together. We’ll be meeting again shortly to see how we can progress things.

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How Staffordshire is bucking the trend in employment and economic growth has caught national attention…

Ok, nowhere is ‘flying’ in economic terms but it is a statistical fact that our county is doing far better than just about anywhere else in the UK.

It hasn’t ‘just happened’… as I’ve said many times before. We’ve worked hard to up the anti on the attractiveness of Staffordshire as a place to do business nationally and internationally. And it’s working!

We’ve supported viable businesses, where banks have failed to do that, right across Staffordshire meaning hundreds of new jobs created and saved. And we’ve invested heavily in apprenticeships, new start up business parks (in the right places!) and generally providing infrastructure and practical reasons for external investment.

So it certainly is working. And it’s because of the approach we’ve taken in Staffordshire which is very different to other parts of the UK. A different political approach and an inbuilt understanding of what business wants and how it works… but also how this fits with Staffordshire’s communities.

The visit by Michael Heseltine, who is tasked by the Government to oversee economic recovery initiatives, is in recognition that we’ve made progress in Staffordshire against the national trend.

So, as I say, we’re not exactly flying but Jaguar Land Rover, Amazon, Associated Parcels and countless others relocating to the county appears to be a trend which is set to gain pace.

Good for jobs and people’s pockets, and good for Staffordshire.

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I’ve been against it from the start for economic reasons and I still remain entirely unpersuaded!!

Today’s announcement by the Sec of State for Transport isn’t, to be fair, unexpected but is unwelcome.

And not just because it would rip a swathe through some of the most fabulous countryside in Staffordshire but also because from a cold assessment of the business case it’s massively risky.

Not just the risk, many say liklihood, of it not creating the growth that’s claimed but also because it could even damage the economy of the Midlands by sucking more investment from here down to London.

I don’t agree with HS2 and see it as a black mark against what is, in the main, an effective  time in office nationally for the Governemnt trying to set the foundations that will be better for the UK in the future.

We’ll see where things go from here!!

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David Cameron’s statement supports last 2 years work to integrate health and care services in Staffordshire…

I have written before about the work we’ve been doing over the last couple of years to improve the healthcare system across Staffordshire as well as the fact it hasn’t got the recognition that it should have done nationally.

That’s probably because it’s been overshadowed by the historical, and tragic, issues at Stafford Hospital. And whilst there’s still a long way to go, a significant milestone has been reached with the formation of the new joint health and social care organisation.

As I say there are many even more complex things we need to do to improve the way the whole healthcare system serves the public and that will take several years to do properly even though we are more advanced than most in Staffordshire.

But the formation of the new organisation and the fundamental changes to the way health and social care professionals will now work as single, rather than different, teams is exactly what the Prime Minister is calling for.

So we are well placed for step change health and care services improvement in Staffordshire during the coming months and years and also prepared to help other areas across the UK to start that journey through the work we’ve already done and our experience.

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