The statutory organisations that commission and provide health and social care services across Nottingham and Nottinghamshire have published their joint five-year Sustainability and Transformation Plan (STP).

Local NHS providers, clinical commissioning groups (CCGs), councils, and other health and care services have formed the Nottingham and Nottinghamshire STP footprint – one of 44 in England – to collectively plan how local services will work to improve the quality of care, their population’s health and manage finances across the system.

The STP partners will continue to work together to develop and deliver these plans – ensuring that health and care services are planned and delivered around the local needs of a place rather than around individual organisations.

The STP for Nottingham and Nottinghamshire addresses how organisations will close the ‘three gaps’ identified in the NHS Five Year Forward View – the future vision for the NHS and social care – which relate to health and wellbeing, care and quality, and finance and efficiency.

The STP identifies five local ‘high impact’ areas for change:
Promoting wellbeing, prevention, independence and self-care
Strengthening primary, community, social care and carer services
Simplifying urgent and emergency care
Delivering technology enabled care
Ensuring consistent and evidenced based pathways in planned care.

In addition, key supporting areas of work have been highlighted within the plan as crucial to delivery, including; improving housing and environment, strengthening acute services, driving system efficiency and effectiveness, workforce and organisational development and proactive communication and engagement.

David Pearson, corporate director for Adult Social Care at Nottinghamshire County Council and STP lead for Nottingham and Nottinghamshire, said: “STPs will drive a genuine and sustainable transformation in health and care outcomes over the next five years and help accelerate the implementation of the NHS Five Year Forward View locally.

“As well as strengthening local relationships through joint planning and working, the STP provides us with a shared understanding of the current challenges, a joint ambition and the steps needed to achieve the sustainability of local health and care services for the future.

“We know that if we do not work together to transform the way we plan and deliver care we will be facing a local, financial gap of more than £600m over the next five years – the difference between the resources we will need and the resources available to us.

“This figure represents our financial challenge if we do nothing, but the STP gives us the opportunity and impetus to work differently to achieve better value and outcomes for our population.”

The STP published today is the draft plan submitted to NHS England on 21 October 2016. This plan will continue to be developed, it is not final and no decisions have been made about changing the way services are provided.

It is a reflection of local organisations’ current thinking about what needs to be done to improve health and wellbeing, the quality of care and local services, and address the financial challenge.

David added: “Now that a high level plan has been drafted, all organisations involved with the STP want to talk to those people who live and work in Nottingham and Nottinghamshire about how it can be improved and what needs to be done to make this happen.

“We will be listening to many individuals and organisations over the coming months, including patients, service-users and carers, particularly around any changes to services and to understand the support that people require to help them live healthier, more independent lives.”