Shropshire Clinical Commissioning Group's £16m funding cut warning

Healthcare in Shropshire will be cut by £16m in real terms over the next five years, a commissioning group has said.

Shropshire Clinical Commissioning Group said it must work intensively to make sure services were available for everyone.

It said Shropshire had been classed "as 4.6% over funded".

The group, which has a budget for 2013/14 of £347m, said it was working with MPs about possible lobbying over the issue.

Clinical Commissioning Groups are GP-led organisations responsible for commissioning healthcare on behalf of patients.

In England, they replaced primary care trusts in April last year.

'Intensive work'

The Shropshire group's accountable officer, Caron Morton, said: "We've heard with the funding allocation... that Shropshire's been classed as 4.6% over funded, so in real terms that means that our funding will go down by £16m over the next five years.

"The difficulty with Shropshire is that it's quite unique in that we've got rurality, we have deprivation as well, an ageing population with high long-term conditions and very few areas actually have all of those components together.

"That means it's more expensive to provide healthcare for Shropshire.

"Over the next two to three years we're going to have to do some very intensive work to look at how we can live within our budget to make sure that services are available the entire year for the whole population."

She added the group was working hard with MPs "alongside the local authority, with the local councillors and also with public health to have a look and see whether we can lobby, whether we can get recognition of rural funding issues".