A health boss has said GPs don’t understand a major plan proposing changes to health services, let alone the public.
Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent’s Sustainability and Transformation Plan (STP), published in December, suggests cutting more than 160 hospital beds across the country and increasing and improving services delivered in the community.
At a meeting last Tuesday Stafford Borough Council’s health scrutiny committee said more must be done to explain the STP to the public and asked why, for example, an informative video couldn’t be shown on TV screens at GP surgeries.
Chairing the meeting, Councillor Ann Edgeller said: “I’ve been to some doctors’ surgeries over the past few weeks and there is nothing about the STP. These are the people we are trying to tap into.”
Andrew Donald, the accountable officer of Stafford and Surrounds Clinical Commissioning Group, said: “The reason there’s nothing in GP surgeries is because the average GP wouldn’t understand what the STP is.
“We haven’t got any depth to the STP at the moment. It’s at a strategic level. You need to get into it with practitioners, staff, the public. We haven’t done that.”
Read more at the Staffordshire Newsletter, 22nd March 2017