On the day of last week’s County Council Health Committee meeting, a young friend was off sick. He was at Papworth Hospital for open heart surgery to correct a life threatening condition. Our committee meeting started at 1PM. As the afternoon went on, I thought of my colleague, wondering how his operation was going.

The committee agenda was huge as usual, reflecting the intensive care status of our health care system and efforts to save it. The Cambridgeshire and Peterborough health economy is famously one of the ‘most challenged’ if not ‘the most challenged’ in the country.

We started off with another round of scrutiny of the big NHS ‘Sustainability and Transformation Plan’ for Cambridgeshire and Peterborough. In a nutshell, this is about the fact that things have got to change fast and profoundly for the NHS if it is going to remain intact – or ‘Fit for the Future.’ My question to NHS leaders this time was simply, ‘What are you doing to create confidence that this plan is going to work?’ I can’t remember the exact answer, except for quite a lot of jargon.

I’d already asked before about the impact of Brexit on the NHS and social care workforce, which depends heavily on people from the EU. The answer was that ‘discussions about Brexit had already started; Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust (CPFT) had a large number of staff who would be affected. The chairs of each local NHS trust had asked their HR directors for an impact assessment, a survey of local providers was being undertaken, and the NHS nationally was examining the issue. The local authority was also looking at domiciliary care provision.’ I signalled that I would like to follow this up some more: we need to see that impact assessment.

Another standard item on the agenda was the Finance and Performance Summary of November 2016, which carried a quietly alarming reference to ‘winter pressures on our acute hospital trusts and the health and social care system’.

The newspapers that very morning had carried a headline about 20 hospitals on high alert due to lack of capacity. Someone who’d walked past Addenbrookes A & E mentioned the sign out in front asking, Do you really need to be here?

The next day, I got in touch to find out how my friend was doing after his operation. He told me that after waiting for 9 hours, he was told by his surgeon that it had been cancelled as there was no bed in HDU (high dependency unit) available.

The surgery has now been rescheduled, with a wait of two more weeks. He explained that this is the setup that is given to patients who have already been cancelled and therefore means it is less likely to be cancelled again, but not out of possibility. His operation will carry significant risk, so there is much emotional preparation required in anticipation, plus all the usual arrangements to be made.

So everyone will be hoping that the Sustainability and Transformation Plan to save the NHS in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough works. Of course it has to save lots of money – about £500 million by 2020/21. And there are lots of unknowns to plan around, including ‘how much money will central government be giving us?’

It would have been very nice if the Brexit campaigners’ claim of an extra ‘£350 million per week to the NHS’ had had some grain of truth to it. Instead, not only was the claim removed from the Leave campaign’s website four days after the Referendum, but we now don’t know if the doctors, nurses and other health care professionals from the EU upon whom we depend will be staying in the UK to help take care of us.

One thing is certain: the NHS needs to be supported, not undermined, at this critical time. So, Theresa May, what’s the plan?

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