Working alongside our partners, we have three strategic priority areas (we call them ‘pillars’) to help us to plan what we need to do to make Gloucestershire a healthy place to live and work, and to provide high quality care and support when needed.

These pillars form the structure of our Joint Forward Plan (our plan to meat the health needs of local people over the next five years), and our Integrated Care Strategy, which was developed by the One Gloucestershire Health and Care Partnership.

You can read those documents in more detail via our publications page. Below, we outline our strategic objectives within each pillar (what we want to achieve over the next five years), and our agreed priorities linked to those for the year ahead (2023/24).

Making Gloucestershire a better place for the future

Over the next five years, we will focus on prevention and the wider determinants (i.e. the social, economic, and environmental factors) which influence people’s mental and physical health.

This means helping people to stay healthy, happy, and independent for as long as possible. This includes stopping problems from arising in the first place, not just treating them when they become ill.

During the year ahead, we will:

  • continue to increase our focus on prevention for people of all ages
  • work with wider partners and communities to support people to take an active role in their own health and care.

Transforming what we do

Over the next five years, we will:

  • Work at a locality (district) level alongside our partners and communities to deliver care that is tailored to the areas people live
  • Achieve equity in outcomes, experience, and access. This means working together to address the barriers people face in health and care
  • Create a One Workforce for One Gloucestershire, working to keep the dedicated and skilled people we have already and attract new talent to Gloucestershire
  • Improve quality and outcomes across the whole person journey (we sometimes call this a ‘pathway’). We will do this for people with specific health

conditions (e.g. respiratory illness), groups in our population (e.g. people with a learning disability), or themes focused on the life course (e.g. starting well, ageing well).

In the year ahead we will:

  • Continue to support improvements in outcomes for people at every stage of life – delivering care as close to home as possible and focused on the needs of the individual
  • Reduce unfair and avoidable differences in health and care – including improving outcomes for specific groups of our population
  • Increase recruitment and retention of our One Gloucestershire workforce while building an inclusive and compassionate culture
  • Increase support for people living with major health conditions, focusing more on earlier diagnosis, and preventing people from getting ill in the first place.

Improving health and care services today

We recognise that, in addition to looking ahead, we need to respond immediately to the challenges facing the health and care system today.

In the year ahead, we will:

  • continue to support improvements in access to, and delivery of, urgent and emergency care
  • support primary care (GP services) to build resilience, improve access to care, and increase workforce recruitment and retention
  • reduce backlogs for people waiting for assessment as well as hospital treatment
  • improve mental health support across health and care services
  • creating a financially sustainable health and care system.