A new “ambitious” five year plan focused on improving medical care in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough has been launched.

The board of Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) revealed the plan at their annual general meeting yesterday (September 17).

Speaking to a gathering of NHS officials, councillors and members of the public, Jan Thomas, accountable officer for the CCG, said: "Our new five year plan is complex and ambitious, but the CCG are most definitely looking forward now rather than backwards, and we believe this is to be the right way to use public money.

"We already have a six-point, short-term plan in action focused on 'urgent care', 'primary care', 'cancer', 'diabetes', 'falls' and of course bringing us back to 'financial stability'.

"There is a big agenda with urgent and primary care, and now that we have our 21 primary care networks up and running - all of which was achieved at break-neck speed, which is a testimony to the team who brought this about - we can address this.

"We can't take our foot off of the work that we've been doing to improve our cancer response as we're rated 'outstanding' in this area; and there's nothing worse than going backwards on something.

"But it's no good focusing just on what we're good at and leaving it there, we want to learn from that achievement and apply it to those areas needing improvement - only then we will we get better and better at what we deliver.

"Diabetes is a prime example of an area that for a number of years we simply haven't put enough effort into, and already this is changing.

"Large numbers of our patients are vulnerable through falls, which drives ambulance activity as well as unscheduled admissions - so we're making a commitment to improve our performance around our vulnerable patients.

"Of course getting us back to financial stability goes without saying.

"So that's where we are right now. We're definitely improving - but what do we do to get from 'adequate' to 'good'?

"Our medium-term plan has within it what we call the 'delivery of the six big ticket items'

"These focus on an 'urgent care roundtable', a 'community contract review', 'effective care for outpatients', 'high cost patient management', 'medicines optimisation' and 'GP delivery at scale'.

"It's being implemented already, and I have high hopes for its success.

"But it's what we do from there onwards that will determine how our achievements are really measured.

"I'm delighted to use our AGM to announce a very exciting new 'five year plan' that will take this CCG well into the future, and bring about the level of excellence we all want for our patients.

"Everybody knows our area has a rapidly growing population, yet we still only receive funding of £1,125 per patient to spend on health care in Cambridgeshire.

"Contrast this with our near neighbours in Norfolk who have nothing like the population growth we do, yet they get an average of £1,470 per patient.

"It might not sound like much at first, just £345 per person; but applied across our total population it equates to hundreds of millions of pounds per annum shortfall.

"Therefore, the CCG believes that for the next five years it is critical to 'build population strategic planning' - which basically means 'population and outcomes-based contracting', 'population segmentation and stratification', 'integrated reporting' and most of all 'five year commissioning intentions'.

"We see our role for the future as helping our service providers be really successful at what they do - that means giving them more autonomy at what they're doing, but making certain the resources we have are used efficiently and effectively across the population of Cambridgeshire.

"While our annual budget amounts to something like £1.2bn per annum, it has to be used where it is needed most, and that requires focussing. This new five year plan will do just that.

"We cannot afford to revert to the past where there were huge amounts of duplication of services.

"It is a very exciting plan, and, at the same time very challenging. If I'm honest, I don't expect to be sitting here at next year's AGM telling everybody that we got everything in the new plan right - but, given the unprecedented volume of people that our service providers are now seeing, we have to make sure that they have the provision to deliver it.

"That is the aim, and we will see that it is carried out."