The Improvement and Scrutiny Committee - Health met to consider three reports on the performance and plans for health services in Derbyshire, and the Committee’s own work programme.

East Midlands Ambulance Service

The Committee received a verbal report from the East Midlands Ambulance Service on their performance. The report pack included slides from a presentation made by Craig Whyles, the Divisional Director for the East Midlands Ambulance Service in Derbyshire. Mr Whyles's presentation included a discussion of what the service refers to as its C2-30 plan, which covers the service's ambitions to respond to calls from people requiring urgent, but not life-threatening, care within 30 minutes. The service's plan involved increasing capacity, managing demand and supporting staff, with a particular focus on increasing the size of the ambulance service workforce and improving staff retention rates.

ICB Joint Forward Plan

The Integrated Care Board (ICB) was scheduled to present its Joint Forward Plan (JFP), a five-year plan for how the NHS will respond to the health needs of the population of Derbyshire. The plan was first published in June 2023 and the report to the committee was to update it on progress since the plan's inception.

The JFP was based around “5 guiding policies for action,” namely:

• Best Care for everyone
• Outstanding people
• Empowered communities
• Smart use of resources
• Stronger system, brighter future

The report set out the challenges faced by the NHS, which include industrial action and high inflation, but highlighted that “despite the challenges over the last 18 months…the NHS in Derby and Derbyshire is making fair progress in recovering access, improving the quality of care, and delivering efficiencies so that we can live within our means, over the medium term.” The report then provided an update on progress being made against a number of the ICB’s key priorities, including Primary Care access, elective treatment backlogs, cancer diagnosis and treatment, and ambulance response times.

Perhaps the most interesting insight into the future of the NHS in Derbyshire came in the penultimate section of the report, where it was stated that

“whilst progress has been made on some aspects of the JFP, we recognise that our improvement effort needs to focus on achieving more fundamental change at a greater scale and pace over the remaining period of the JFP period, which will be shaped significantly by the priorities of the new Government and its 10-year plan for health and care, which will be published in the spring 2025.”

Work Programme

The Committee was also scheduled to review its draft Work Programme for the remainder of the 2024-25 municipal year. The Committee had previously agreed to receive a report from the ICB on medicine shortages and their impact on the health of people in Derbyshire. This request had been made by Councillor Gary Musson at the previous meeting of the committee on 23 September 2024 and arose from his concerns about the impact of medication shortages on people in his division.