Health bosses have set out their priorities for the winter ahead.

Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent have been put with Shropshire and Telford and Wrekin as part of an Integrated Care Board (ICB) cluster.

At a Health and Wellbeing Board meeting on Thursday (17 September), Gareth Wright, director of system improvement, co-ordination and emergency preparedness, resilience and response at the ICB, said the new cluster brings some changes.

"An overarching thing is we do recognise the different needs in the two counties," said Mr Wright.

"So, in no way are we taking away any of the resource we would have put in Shropshire in favour of balancing out between the two.

"We have produced a single winter plan covering both sides of the cluster.

That is going to our public board for approval.

"This year, we've now got a unified command and control structure – we have a single executive team for the ICB, and we have a single system co-ordination centre which manages the day-to-day operational flows and pressures on the urgent emergency care pathway.

"That is unified with the Staffordshire side – it is smaller in some of the parts, but that's been a reflection of the Government's NHS reset and the reductions that we've made in our team.

"We will try and learn from both county's experience from last year and messaging in our winter comms campaign will be common.

We will still be making some funding interventions to ease the winter pressures this year within the affordability we have."

During last winter, Shrewsbury and Telford hospitals had a bed occupancy of around 82 per cent on Christmas Eve – which Mr Wright said was a much better position than the previous year.

For this coming winter, the aim is to have an 80 per cent bed occupancy by Christmas Day, and "avoid losing pace" over the festive period.

However, Mr Wright has pointed out the challenges staff will have due to there being an extra Bank Holiday.

"We need to make sure that we build capacity before that, do as well as can during it, and then importantly bounce back afterwards," he said.

"Easter is also particularly early this year.

"It falls in March which is still within our winter period as far as are are for planning purposes.

"That is another four-day weekend which does give us high pressure.

"So again, we're going to plan for that and make sure we're ready for it."

Header image via Jonathan Hutchins on Geograph