Our plan for improving health and care in Gloucestershire.

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Our vision is to make Gloucestershire the healthiest place to live and work, where there is equity in life chances, and to ensure that best health and care outcomes are available for all.

While healthy life expectancy is shaped largely by the conditions people live in, rather than by healthcare alone, this plan sets out the role the NHS will play. It focuses on three national and local priorities:

  • Preventing sickness, not just treating it
  • Moving more care to the community rather than in hospital
  • Making better use of digital technology

Our Population Health and Strategic Commissioning Plan sets out our ambitions and plans for how we will commission partners to deliver this change over the next five years.

Download the plan

Our three strategic ambitions for 2026-2031:

  1. Healthy Lives: Supporting people to live healthier lives for longer, by preventing avoidable illness and decline.
  2. Health Equity: Health outcomes, experience, and access are fairer across all communities.
  3. Best Value: What we value is defined by people’s experiences and outcomes within a sustainable system.

Our problems to solve:

  1. Gloucestershire is a comparatively healthy county, but the population is growing and ageing.
  2. As people age, more will have long-term conditions, but how we age as is as important as how long we live.
  3. Some groups of people experience worse health outcomes than others, leading to inequity across the county.
  4. Health and care services perform well, but rising demand (particularly from people with complex needs) creates pressure
  5. These changing demographic patterns mean that continuing to deliver care in the same way will not be sustainable to meet future need.

During winter 2025/26, we carried out engagement with local people in Gloucestershire about how we can meet our local challenges together. We asked for people’s views on how we should prioritise our resources, as well as what matters most to them.

We had almost 500 responses to our survey, in addition to engaging with communities in their local area. You can read more about the engagement we carried out and its outcomes here.

We’ve also summarised what local people told us was important to them in the plan from page 16.

1. Supporting people to stay healthy at home

We will support people to live healthier, more independent lives for longer by promoting healthy behaviours, reducing risk factors (such as smoking, inactivity, poor diet and isolation) and strengthening social connection within local communities.

We will also increase early detection and diagnosis of illness, greater use of community pharmacies for prevention and health promotion, and appropriate use of digital tools to help people manage their own health.

2. Proactive personalised high-quality care in Neighbourhoods for people at greater risk of poor health

Care will be organised around neighbourhoods of 30-50,000 people, aligned to Primary Care Networks. This will include the development of Integrated Neighbourhood Teams (INTs) who will provide proactive and person-centred care for people with rising or complex health needs.

These teams will focus on people with rising or complex needs, supported by specialist advice and support, and delivered increasingly through local hubs operating 12 hours a day, six days a week.

3. Specialist and high-quality care and support across multiple Neighbourhoods

More care will be delivered in community settings rather than hospitals, alongside transforming how care is provided.

Earlier assessments and diagnostics in the community will be available, building on the success of our Community Diagnostic Centre.

Services that provide more support when people need it and less as they recover, will be expanded to help prevent avoidable admissions and support faster recovery and independence.

4. More streamlined secondary care services that enable high quality care

Some specialist services will be provided from centralised locations where this improves quality and outcomes. People have told us that they are willing to travel for specialist care and treatment.

Specialist care settings will be streamlined while also supporting people during an emergency or crisis. We will ensure that care in these settings is safe and gets people home quickly when appropriate.