| Delayed Blog! ---
24 Jan 2010
I am just doing a quick blog to say sorry for not blogging! As well as technical difficulties with the site, January has turned out to be a busy old month.
We started the year with bad weather which has meant that us District Nurses have been working extra hard to get to the patients in the snow, which has resulted in some frozen shoulder difficulties for me. A quick trip to the GP and a steroid injection into the joint has brought ease. I do pay tribute to the good people of Ferryhill who had to push myself and my colleagues on many occasions. It was nice to see a tribute in today’s Echo praising the efforts of the District Nurses during the bad weather period.
We have had leaked information to the press about the Darlington Stroke Unit, which proved a little premature to say the least. We then had a scrutiny committee meeting about the issue but the chair seemed reluctant to discuss the matter of the leaked information.
The Health and Well-being scrutiny committee has had a long history of working cross-party in order to scrutinise decisions made by all the health trusts to ensure the people of Darlington have the best health services possible.
So, it is a shame that the Senior Councillors in the Labour party choose not to share the information about the Stroke Unit with the members of this committee but to instead give it to a Labour backbench councillor in order to make some “perceived” political gain. This has sadly backfired and instead of political glory all that has been achieved is fear and angst amongst some of the elderly residents in this town.
As a member of the Health Scrutiny Committee and a registered nurse, I would like to reassure people that I will absolutely fight to keep this much needed unit open should the need arise and support the efforts of the Acute Trust to recruit a new Stroke Consultant.
We have the first of the Darlington debates at Lingfield Point, which was well attended, the next one I understand is to be the Parliamentary candidates, the invite list should be interesting. With the election campaigns firing up, we have seen a lot of Mike Barker in the press of late. Flapjack sales must be proving slow, Mike!
There has been much debate about the budget both inside and outside the Town Hall, with 77 redundancies planned and cuts to pay enhancements. It is certainly a politicians budget, with zero raise in council tax planned but is enough to keep the Parliamentary seat this May as well as win the local election next May?
This coming week I have meetings every night and on two nights I am double booked, some prioritising needing to be done. The ward work is busy also, some of this the unseen work that councillors do, helping people with personal issues.
There is much street cleaning to be done now the snow has gone and I have asked Streetscene to make sure that this ward is made a priority as we have received some complaints and we can see for ourselves whilst out with the dog that attention is needed.
Anyway, thought I would blog whilst I had a spare minute and must learn to blog from my I-phone.
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