Sustainability and Transformation Plans (STPs) are considered to be one of the most important factors within the NHS Five Year Forward Plan. They aim to show how local services will evolve and become sustainable over the next five years, maintaining the vision of the Five Year Forward Plan to have better health, deliver better patient care and have improved NHS efficiency.

There have been 44 STP ‘footprints’ formed and are locally defined and based on factors such as patient flows, existing working communities and the scale needed to deliver services.

STPs will hopefully improve and invest in preventative, primary and community based care. The pressure of the winter months caused the NHS to overspend when hospitals and services struggled to keep up with demands. Hospitals were seeing more patients than were budgeted for and there were issues discharging patients because of a lack of community services and community based care. The hope is that STPs will begin a movement towards one health and social care system.With a more integrated model of care it is hoped that the NHS will better meet the changing needs of the population. For example, working with Clinical Commissioning Groups or other NHS bodies, will help to provide a more coordinated level of care and service to patients. This way we will be working towards a system that not only responds to pressures but helps to prevent them in the future, ultimately providing a greater range of healthcare services closer to patient’s homes.

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