A crucial five-year blueprint for health services in Worcestershire is about to be revealed – with NHS bosses warning of a £250 million ‘gap’. On Tuesday a new strategy for the county’s health sector is due to be published, starting a wave of public consultation.
The dossier, known as the ‘Sustainability and Transformation Plan’ (STP), has already been interrogated by NHS England and will have big implications for the county.
Under the plan, Worcestershire has been lumped together with Herefordshire to gage what sort of demand the counties expect to have to deal with by 2021. Warnings have been fired that if all services remain as they are, by then the two areas would be a whopping £250 million in the red.
The impending release of the proposals was debated during a meeting of the health and wellbeing board at Worcestershire County Council.
Simon Trickett, chief operating officer at the South Worcestershire Clinical Commissioning Group, said: “A lot of work has gone into it.
“We can work out our aspirations of where we’d want services to be by 2021, and then work backwards so we can decide what steps we need to take each year in order to get there.”
Full story in Worcester News, 18 November 2016