The STP footprint collaboration of NHS and local authority leaders in the area published its full plan following the 21 October final submission deadline.
The five year plan outlines how the collaboration aims to avoid the current need for an additional 430 in-patient beds by 2020/21 partly by shifting more care into primary and community services.
The plan proposes a sustainability programme for general practices and an enhanced general medical practice offer, although there is no detail yet on these programmes. LMC leaders said that much of the plans for general practice lack ‘flesh on the bone’ as yet.
STP system leader Mark Rogers, chief executive of Birmingham City Council, said in a statement to the public that the plan was ‘still in the stages of being fully developed' and the final plan would be ready for implementation from April.
The STP, he said, had been ‘designed to ensure that over the next five years we do all we can to promote the best health and wellbeing in our communities’.
Primary care at scale
Under the plans new care models and primary care at scale will be rolled out across the region. Extended, 8 til 8 access to general practice will be agreed in May 2017. And by next October the ten high impact actions to release GP time set out in the GP Forward View will have been implemented and the roll out of a new ‘universal offer to support enhanced general medical practice’ will begin.
The enhanced services offer will be focused on long-term conditions and aim to reduce health inequalities and improve population health and wellbeing and includes a review of current local incentive/improvement schemes.
A sustainability programme for practices, aiming to achieve 100% rated good or outstanding by CQC, will also begin next October.
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Elsewhere the plans involve a network of new integrated urgent care centres, a community-based long term conditions management service, a prevention and wellbeing promotion stream and the stabilisation and transformation of social care.
STP outcomes for general practice include a 10.1% increase in patient satisfaction and an 8% increase in patients able to access general practice when required by 2019.
Birmingham LMC chief executive Dr Robert Morley said the STP was ‘simply undeliverable’.
He said: ‘The STP, and in particular the plans to massively increase the delivery of out-of-hospital care, to transform general practice and to give it far greater responsibilities across a range of areas are simply undeliverable bearing in mind the meagre additional investment, the unambitious plans to increase primary care workforce and the woefully inadequate intention to support general practice sustainability and viability.'
Photo: JH Lancy
