Hilary Hibbert-Biles, Oxfordshire County Council cabinet member for public health and the voluntary sector, on public health issues

Health affects everyone in Oxfordshire at some time in their lives, from babies to the elderly – and the consequences of poor health impacts on families, job security and standard of living. No age group is immune.

It is important to have a healthy lifestyle programme, starting with children. Healthy children will make healthy adults. Prevention is better than cure, which is why school health nurses are now in every state secondary school in Oxfordshire and we are the only county to have made this happen.

Public health funding is ring-fenced to the local authority from the Department of Health. It needs to stay that way to protect spending on public health issues.

I am delighted the NHS is ring-fenced in the Government’s budget and pleased the Oxfordshire Clinical Commissioning Group, which decides where health funding is spent, have been given a six-and-a-half per cent increase which equates to £45m from government.

Acute hospitals need to be centres of excellence and need sufficient funding. However, our community hospitals, such as Wantage, Witney and Chipping Norton, need protecting.

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If the John Radcliffe has overflowing A&E, procedures cancelled because they have no beds and we cannot discharge people because they have nowhere to go, that community hospitals are essential. Many provide local consultant clinics, X-ray and maternity, minor injuries units or first aid units as well as in-patient beds or intermediate care beds.

Hospital at home is being piloted. This is fine if you have family, as well as professionals, to take care of you. However, to be discharged from an acute hospital straight home, with someone calling each day, is not sufficient care whether you are elderly, a mother with children to take care of or someone living on their own.

The professionals will also need to travel between homes which is both time consuming and costly. There needs to be a halfway house – which is the community hospital – until patients are able to return home with minimal care needed.

This would then free up beds at acute hospitals for more patients to be admitted as an emergency and for elective surgery.

We need local access to out-of-hours GPs, minor injuries units or first aid units manned by paramedics – as we have in Chipping Norton – operating in the evenings, weekends and bank holidays.

They do a superb job and having access to these units leaves A&E departments at acute hospitals free for those with serious emergency illness. This would do away with long waiting times and in turn will help patients, doctors and nurses alike.

Extra funding the clinical commissioning group has received should go to supporting our community hospitals as well as our acute hospitals. Both are essential to the community’s wellbeing.

I would not want to leave out the ambulance service. We have great staff who are dedicated – but not enough of them and not enough ambulances. Ambulance response times are slow unless you are near an ambulance station – and this is especially so if you are in a rural area, which is most of our county.

The clinical commissioning group has a tough time deciding the allocation of their funding – there is no doubt about that, but patient care should be at the heart of their decision-making, which in many cases means local facilities.