NHS week: What’s for the chop where you live?
You may not know it, but over the past year local NHS leaders across England have been meeting to draw up plans to overhaul the health service.
The country has been split into 44 regions, with each asked to come up with a strategy to make services fit for the 21st century.
The initiative – catchily called sustainability and transformation plans or STPs for short – has been shrouded in secrecy after NHS England bosses encouraged local leaders to keep them quiet.
But now all the outline plans have been published and the BBC has been analysing what is in each one.
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So what happens next? There will be full public consultations in areas where major changes are going to take place, such as the closure of hospital services.
Some areas are being asked to provide more details on what they have set out, so you may find in some of the summaries the BBC highlighting the fact the plans lack detail.
But NHS bosses are hoping implementation will begin later this year. The plans have been developed following the publication of NHS England’s five-year plan for the health service in 2014.
That led to the government committing to an £8bn increase in the frontline NHS budget during this parliament. In return the NHS has to make £22bn of efficiency savings.
A key part of that is reorganising how services are run locally. NHS England says the aim is to make the health service more efficient and better geared to keeping people well and out of hospital, but critics say the plans are simply cuts .
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Hugh Alderwick, from the King’s Fund, has been looking at the plans for a report which the think-tank will be publishing later this month. He predicts they will prove controversial.
“All the plans talk about better integrating primary care – that includes GPs, district nursing and mental health – with the view to keeping people out of hospital.
“But, of course, that is leading to a number also making proposals about consolidating hospital services on fewer sites. The public and politicians will be very interested in those when the consultations start.”