Welcome to the Triangle – April 2025
Welcome to the latest edition of the Triangle.
As someone with an interest in health and care, you may have heard the news about some major reforms to the NHS in recent weeks.
Over the last few months, both NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care have been discussing closer working and avoiding duplication. Work is now under way to reform the NHS to best support the frontline to deliver for patients and drive the government’s reform priorities.
Changes are expected to take place, at pace, over the coming months.
As part of the need to make best possible use of taxpayers’ money to support frontline services, NHS England has informed us that the running and programme costs of ICBs will need to be reduced by around 50 per cent.
These plans are currently at an early stage, and we are awaiting further information, but our understanding is that ICBs will continue to exist and work around developing a new ICB model, which outlines future functions and responsibilities, is already under way.
Within BSW, we remain committed to ensuring that it is business as usual for the people and communities we serve, and we are proud of the strong partnerships we have created with health and care organisations across our area.
During these uncertain times, ensuring that services are not disrupted, and that we continue to deliver our ambitious transformational improvements, in collaboration with our partners, are vitally important to our hard working and committed staff.
The Triangle will continue to showcase the best that the NHS in Bath and North East Somerset, Swindon and Wiltshire has to offer, highlight innovation and keep you updated about the progress we are making with our partners to improve health and care for local people and communities.
We are already making headway in bringing to life the government’s aims of moving from hospital care to community care, to shift from sickness to preventative care, and to digitise the health service.
Our new approach to community-based care demonstrates this, as we were one of the first ICBs in the country to look at how out-of-hospital care could be transformed for the benefit of local people, and we are now working together towards seeing this vision materialise.
HCRG Care Group formally took on the role of leading our new community-based partnership on Tuesday 1 April. The next few weeks should be seen as an exciting time for health and care in our region, not least because it provides us with a unique opportunity to begin to do things differently, and to truly harness the power of innovation and change, working closely with our population to co-design improvements.
We’ll talk more about community services in future editions of the Triangle but, for now, the notions of innovation and change are extremely timely, as both feature heavily in future plans for the NHS as a whole.
In this edition, you can find out more about the conversations that we have been having with local groups to inform the new NHS 10-Year Plan.
We will have our first glimpse of the long-awaited plan in just a few short weeks, and we’re expecting it to set out how the health service will essentially evolve in order to futureproof itself for generations to come.
Recent conversations that we’ve had with local people about what they would like from their NHS have fed into the plan, with much of the feedback sourced suggesting that access to care needs to be improved, services need to work better together and more needs to be done to reduce inefficiencies.
Judging by what we’ve heard so far, we believe the plan will align with that of our own five-year integrated care strategy, which centres around the four key purposes of integrated care boards, which are to:
- Improve outcomes in population health and healthcare
- Tackle inequalities in outcomes, experience and access
- Enhance productivity and value for money
- Help the NHS support broader social and economic development
We aim to begin the 2025/26 financial year in much the same way as we left the previous one, with a rock-solid focus on achieving our aim of breaking even in the next 12 months.
It’s a bold ambition, but one that fits the ethos of our organisation, which has always been to be deliberately proud about all that we do, and to lead from the front.
We hope the positive stories featured in this edition demonstrates that the heart of your NHS is still very much beating.
With warm regards,
Sue Harriman,
Chief Executive Officer
and
Stephanie Elsy,
Chair