Health commissioning group to hold last AGM

The final annual meeting of the health commissioning group which oversees Shropshire will be held next week.

Shropshire Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) said it is urging the public to come along to the meeting on July 10 to “celebrate our successes”.

The CCG is set to merge with Telford CCG early next year in a bid to cut costs and become more efficient.

The news was met with dismay by many Telford councillors and residents as their CCG ran a balanced budget, while Shropshire CCG is in deficit of £28 million.

Dr Julian Povey, chairman of Shropshire CCG, said: “The annual meeting is an opportunity to look back on the work we have done in the last financial year from April 1, 2018, to March 31, 2019, and celebrate our successes as well as take forward learning to help us continue to develop high quality health services for the people of Shropshire.”

He said venue is at Shrewsbury Town’s Montgomery Waters Meadow stadium in the  Football Club, Oteley Road, Shrewsbury, in the Sovereign Suite.

He said staff from the CCG will also be on hand to answer questions about their work and the CCG’s projects from 10.30am to 11.30am.

This will be followed by the annual meeting, which will be from 11.30am to 12.30pm, when the annual report will be presented and the work of the CCG in the last financial year will be highlighted.

In the afternoon there will be the Governing Body Meeting from 1.30pm to approximately 4pm.

Last week it was revealed that bosses are “working hard” to reassure staff ahead of the merger, with no decision taken as yet on the scale of redundancies, although it has been confirmed there will be just one accountable officer.

David Evans, accountable officer for Telford CCG, said: “We have not yet made any decision on redundancies be it voluntarily or otherwise, but we would want to move quickly to ensure that there is no long period of uncertainty for staff.

“While nothing has been decided yet, uncertainty often leads to people leaving where they work to find somewhere stable so we are working to reassure people quickly.”

The decision to merge the county’s two health commissioning groups was made after they were told to save £1.2 million between them this year.