For some years the NHS has been in a state of flux, continuously re-organising and restructuring. At times it has been difficult to keep up with what has changed, been replaced or announced only to be abandoned. In a briefing to council members last week (22/5/26), Uttlesford Chief Executive Peter Holt outlined positive changes in local delivery of services in Essex that should benefit Uttlesford residents:
The most recent iteration (of ongoing restructuring) has been to shrink the number of Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) that commission NHS services across large geographical areas. Uttlesford (alongside Harlow and Epping Forest) was part for several years of the West Essex Health and Care Partnership, itself a sub-set of the Herts and West Essex ICB. In this latest merger of ICBs (accompanied by a 50% cut in management costs), Hertfordshire is now in a bigger new ICB with Cambridgeshire and Peterborough; and Uttlesford, Epping and Harlow are now part of a whole-Essex ICB.
Over the last few years, we (the chief executive and responsible cabinet member) have been pressing hard within these NHS structures to make sure patients in Uttlesford don’t lose out – particularly as the majority of our residents in the north use Addenbrookes when they need a hospital, rather than Broomfield or Princess Alexandra.
Our successes have included lobbying and gaining agreement that the ‘Ticket Home’ scheme commissioned by the ICB (supporting patients ready to be discharged from hospital to sort out logistical issues at home that might otherwise have delayed things) should continue to be commissioned by a local provider rather than rolled into a contract run from Harlow, which our GPs didn’t think was as good quality.
Another achievement has been to quickly and successfully challenge a situation in which opthamology and prenatal patients in the Dunmow area accustomed to being treated at Broomfield were instead effectively forced to go to Princess Alexandra.
These successes have been achieved through a very effective partnership with our local GPs, who organise in two Primary Care Networks (PCNs) – one for north Uttlesford and one for south Uttlesford. The PCNs have also made great strides in recent years in leading neighbourhood focused health and care Integrated Neighbourhood Teams, giving a joined up service, wrapping around patients.
Now that government is clear about the future of local government (putting Uttlesford together with Epping and Harlow), the newly-expanded Essex ICB has mirrored these arrangements in their five multi-neighbourhood arrangements. This is sensible and welcome.
At an even more local level, the Essex ICB has confirmed its future map of neighbourhood level organisation (each serving a population of about 50,000 people), and for Uttlesford this matches our current north Uttlesford and south Uttlesford PCN boundaries, so this too keeps together already effective and innovative teams.
One of the first things the Essex ICB is working on is a bid to government for new neighbourhood health hubs, either serving concentrations of 100,000, 50,000 or 30,000 people. This health hub idea should mean that for various medical functions too big for a GP practice patients shouldn’t need to travel all the way to their nearest large hospital. We are supporting a submission into this bid to attract funding both for a hub at the Community Hospital in Saffron Walden, and also to pilot a more dispersed, rural model serving south Uttlesford.