Joint Forward Plan

Click here to download our Joint Forward Plan 

Click here to download the appendix

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Context we are working within

Gloucestershire in 2025/26 faces three key healthcare challenges:

More people living into older age with long-term health conditions

Gloucestershire’s population is growing, with significant increases in older adults and those living with long-term health conditions. Life expectancy remains higher than the national average, but there are noticeable differences between areas in our county.

Increasing workforce challenges across the NHS and our partners

The health and care system in Gloucestershire employs over 25,000 staff and faces significant recruitment challenges, particularly in specialist roles and some frontline social care roles. To meet local population demands, we need to work differently in future, extending the use of multi-disciplinary teams and making the best use of the technology available. We also need to continue to address challenges in recruitment and retention through implementing our One Gloucestershire People Strategy.

More pressure on NHS budgets

As we approach 2025/26, our budget will increase to £1.46bn, a change of around c£44m. This must fund staff pay awards, the impact of the national living wage, employer national insurance contributions, the cost of new drugs and devices as agreed by NICE such as weight management medication plus the requirement to meet increasing demand for services and other increased costs.

Against this financial backdrop, health and care partners will need to improve productivity and efficiency (e.g. reduce waste), deliver improved performance in priority areas and ensure quality and safety in local services.

Our Clinical and Care Approach

To address these healthcare challenges and deliver our priorities, we need to develop the way that we deliver health and care.

We are committed to meeting the three shifts that have been outlined by the Government as part of the 10-Year Health Plan:

Shift 1: Moving more care from hospitals to communities.
Shift 2: Making better use of technology in health and care (moving from analogue to digital)
Shift 3: Focusing on prevention rather than sickness.

Our collective aim is to encourage a ‘left shift’, enabling individuals to maintain independence and live as well as possible in a place they call home. We want to ensure that each person has the best possible health and wellbeing through a combination of lifestyle choices, social factors and health and care support.

Together with stakeholders we have begun to describe this through our clinical and care model. This approach describes our commitment to delivering care closer to home – but also recognises that due to reasons of quality and safety, it may be necessary to deliver some services centrally. We describe this as ‘local where possible, centralised where necessary’.

We will continue to develop the Clinical and Care Model over the next year, working with clinical and care leads, as well as people with lived experience.

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