Health chief went from foot care to rolling out millions of vaccines
DERBYSHIRE NHS leader who helped mastermind the county’s Covid-19 vaccination roll-out is retiring after decades in the health service.
William Jones, the chief operating officer at Derbyshire Community Health Services, started his career in 1984 as a podiatrist – a foot care specialist – but his time in the NHS saw him switch this for the challenge of vaccinating an entire county against a new deadly virus.
His time in the NHS has seen great change since the 1980s, when he says dozens of Derbyshire hospital beds would be filled with elderly patients who were regularly spending up to a decade in hospital up until their deaths.
He also recounts the vast health inequalities which are still present today and the more specific Derbyshire issues of mining families who had been given supplies of coal as part of pension agreements and the issues this brought with lung illnesses and cold homes.
Mr Jones says pressures on nonemergency call-outs had once seen him driving around Derbyshire with a clinician to try to pick up some of the calls which health services could not get to. On several occasions, he said, the worried elderly patients had died by the time they arrived.
Mr Jones said he would like to see the amount of higher education capacity to train more doctors, nurses and health professionals and specialists increased so it can keep pace with NHS demand.
In an interview with the Local Democracy Reporting Service, Mr Jones looks back fondly on his move from his home town of Criccieth on the North Wales coast to Derbyshire.
Now aged 59, he made the career move from Wales 140 miles to a base and temporary home above Newholme Hospital in Bakewell nearly 40 years ago after effectively being head-hunted at a friend’s barbecue. He confesses that, at the time, he “had no idea where Derbyshire was” but since then has raised two children – Sophie and Maddie, now aged 32 and 29 – with wife Tracy, from their Great Hucklow home.
This long-term tie with the community in which he works has been a key defining factor of his career and helped motivate Mr Jones to strive for change, he says.
Moving to the area in the 1980s, Mr Jones tells the LDRS that there were two key takeaways.
One was the sheer number of elderly patients who were in hospital beds for up to 10 years at a time, for almost the entire final years before their deaths – away from home. This is an observation which struck an emotional chord and still drives an aim from Mr Jones to see more patients treated at home and not in a hospital bed.
A second was the significant disparities in health inequalities throughout the north Derbyshire area, from Bakewell to Clay Cross. He said this drastic disparity over a fairly small area within the same county was a wake-up call.
Mr Jones told the LDRS that when he started working in the area there were 220 beds at Walton Hospital in Chesterfield, 80 long-stay beds at Scarsdale Hospital in Chesterfield, and 40-50 long-stay beds at Penmore Hospital in Hasland.
Since then, long-stay beds at Penmore and Scarsdale have closed and Walton now has around 30 beds. He said: “I very, very strongly believe that the changes that happened during my career, from elderly people staying in a hospital bed for the rest of their lives – honestly, some people were there for five, six, seven, eight, 10 years – is a massive change for the better. There is no better bed than your own bed.”
“When I was in my late 20s in those days, learning and getting exposed to things I previously did not have an experience of, seeing elderly people who were unable to express themselves, were immobile, who were being cared for incredibly well, you think to yourself, would I want my grandad or granny in those types of situations?”
He says caring for people in their own homes and partnership with health and social care has been one of the largest and proudest changes.
While chief executive of Derbyshire Health United, Mr Jones recalls a couple of “horrible, dreadful” winters combating flu.
He remembers being on call on Boxing Day night in 2019, when he got a call saying the system could not cope with the number of NHS 111 calls coming in. Mr Jones spoke to the emergency department at Royal Derby Hospital, which said its beds were packed.
At 3am Mr Jones jumped in his car with a doctor and drove around the Eckington and Killamarsh area until around 6am, visiting frail and elderly people who had called 111 because they had the flu. “Sadly, several of them had passed away by the time we arrived,” he said.
Mr Jones said he had a wake-up call about health inequality earlier in his time as a community podiatrist in the Bakewell, Matlock and Clay Cross area. He told the LDRS: “It was early on in those days in Derbyshire that I realised what huge contrasts there were, from working in Bakewell to then working in Clay Cross. That was something I had never really come across before.
“Those contrasts are still with us today. The health inequalities, the difference that there is in an area like Derbyshire where you have got rurality and significant differences in people’s life expectations.”
On community care, Mr Jones says he used to regularly hear from GPS carrying out home visits that they were finding elderly people living alone in cold homes, with one coal fire in one room, who had not seen anyone for a long time. All of this compounded health issues.
Mr Jones says one of the key moments of his career of which he is most proud was the Covid-19 vaccination roll-out, which started in the community in January 2021.
He says 2.3 million Covid jabs have now been administered in the county, from a “standing start” in which “we really didn’t have a clue what we were doing” with constantly changing advice and guidelines.
One of his proudest moments was seeing Derbyshire, and primarily the Derby area mass vaccination site, regularly “top of the league” in terms of number of jabs administered.
There is a twinkle in Mr Jones’ eyes when he reflects on the “thousands and thousands of lives we have saved by giving people the vaccine”. He says he is proud to have been part of a team of people who rearranged their entire lives to make the vaccine roll-out work, including scores of retired health professionals coming back to work.
Mr Jones says: “It has been exhausting, but it is a nice way to go out.”
During his time as chair of Bolsover District Local Strategic Partnership in the early 90s, Mr Jones helped target significant sums of Government money at health inequality issues in the area. He recalls the “wider determinants of health” and that most elderly people in Bola sover had worked for the National Coal Board and with their pensions received coal.
However, he said when pensioners became frail and elderly they became less able to lug the coal around and start the fires to heat their homes. Mr Jones worked with British Gas to persuade them to bring gas into old mining villages which were relying on solid fuel – a cleaner and safer alternative. He said it also meant the county council did not need to get home help staff to come and clear and start these fires.
“It is not just about doctors and nurses, it is about what makes for people’s health and wellbeing being better in the longer term.” He says “there is always work to do” in terms of health inequality, but that housing has improved dramatically and so has access to healthcare.
Key accomplishments for Mr Jones include the setting up of a diabetes foot clinic at Chesterfield Royal Hospital and the Heanor Memorial Health Centre – a replacement for the former Heanor Memorial Hospital – which opened in 2017.
He says aims to develop sites in Belper (Babington Hospital and the new Belper Health Centre), Bakewell (Newholme Hospital) and Buxton (merging of hospitals and health centres next to the station) continue to be proud works he has been involved in and hopes to see come forward after his tenure ends.
Mr Jones will retire on May 27 but says he will continue a number of voluntary roles with community groups looking to improve welfare and wellbeing for Derbyshire residents.
It has been exhausting, but it is a nice way to go out.
William Jones