Richard Graham MP says NHS health plans for Gloucestershire show a welcome headline increase of NHS spending of £73 million (10%) over the next few years, with an important emphasis on extra primary care appointments, additional GPs, nurses and meeting A&E targets.
Richard said, “there is a lot of noise about government health ‘cuts’ which simply don’t reflect the reality of increased spending on the NHS. Overall funding of our local NHS has gone up 6.8% from 2014-15 to 2015-16 and will continue to rise during this Parliament. Of course demand rises too (thanks to our ageing population) and how we all deal with this is important. There are still far too many non-urgent cases brought to A&E.
Of course my constituents will want to look at the details. Chapter 6 of the plan (Gloucestershire Care Commissioning Group’s Sustainability and Transformation Plan) outlines how the NHS will engage and communicate with the public, including public drop-in events hosted via the NHS Information Bus. I hope my constituents will attend those in Gloucester.
Personally I’m pleased the plan sets out ambitions to deliver 7 day services in urgent care by 2021 and increase capacity by training more staff mainly in primary care and nursing workforce. This is exactly what I’ve been working with the University of Gloucestershire to deliver – Nursing Degrees, Nursing Associate higher apprenticeships, and also a new Health University Technical College here in Gloucester. I hope the next few months will show real progress on all of these ambitions – which will in turn help our NHS plans, and enable more of our county’s 50,000 health sector jobs to go to Gloucestershire students.”
A copy of the STP can be found here: http://www.gloucestershireccg.nhs.uk/gloucestershire-stp/
The STP also sets targets for:
- 5,000 extra primary care appointments per month
- 65 extra GPs
- 45 extra advanced/specialist nurses
- Achieving the 4 hour A & E waiting time target
