Commitment to find a central Chichester site

Last Friday, I visited St Richard’s Hospital and met the fantastic team running the vaccine hub, where they’re administering the Pfizer-biontech jab, the first of the three approved vaccines for use by the MRHA. I was blown away by the highly technical process; involving painstaking and meticulous preparation and dilution of the vaccines before injection. The clinicians undertook the process with such care and attention, you would think they were handling the Crown Jewels. The brilliant team, led by Zilla and Jackie, are now administering the vaccine at a rate of roughly 700 shots a day. As of last week, the trust as a whole, which includes Worthing, had administered over 10,000 vaccines – covering 62 per cent of its staff.

Meanwhile, Gp-led services in Tangmere, Selsey, and Pulborough are supporting the Chichester district’s efforts to vaccinate those over 80. Soon to be joined by the Riverbank Centre in Midhurst, going live today, and the Petworth Surgery, which is expected to come online soon. Gp-practices are working together to provide the vaccination to their collective patients at centres; necessary to pool resources and ensure venues are big enough to administer the vaccines safely. I have been pressing our local healthcare leaders to look into the delivery of the vaccine through a central site in Chichester. They have committed to revising their plan and are re-looking at central sites. I will of course update you again as soon as I receive any further information about this. As the vaccine rollout continues, I will keep my website updated. In other news, many of you may have seen I recently held a meeting with the chief executive of Southern Water Ian Mcaulay and local councillors to raise concerns with ongoing storm discharges into the Chichester Harbour. We also discussed longer-term issues, such as the system capacity with more houses planned in the future. On the latter point, it was particularly useful to have members of the district council present as they are the planning authority. I know both sides are keen to continue working together to tackle some of these issues with further meetings already planned. The water company is making some in-roads to addressing its performance on discharge events, including better monitoring with the ‘beachbuoy’ app that tracks and publicises these events in near real-time, however, much more still needs to be done. To achieve this, I’m also working with the regulator, Ofwat, which I met with in advance of the Southern Water meeting. I am also due to continue my discussions with both the Environment Agency and the Minister for the Environment in the coming weeks. These issues will not go away overnight; however, I will continue to work closely with everyone involved to do what I can to protect the harbour.