THE organisation responsible for arranging and paying for health services in Worcestershire has set out its plans to improve the quality of healthcare in the county.

A meeting of the governing body of the South Worcestershire Clinical Commissioning Group (SWCCG) on Thursday, March 27 heard how the organisation planned to meet a set of five quality targets set by the NHS.

Members heard SWCCG was in the worst 30 per cent of CCGs for the amount of patients reporting a poor experience of care in hospitals and measures are in development to improve this figure over the next few years. But it was also reported the amount of patients in the region reporting poor experiences in their general practice or in the community was extremely low.

The meeting also heard patients in the county lose about 1,893 years of life every year to conditions which can be treated by medication and healthcare – putting SWCCG in the best 30 per cent in the country – but that it hoped to improve this by 3.2 per cent each year to 1,557 by 2020.

SWCCG is also among the best 25 per cent of organisations for quality of life for people with long-term conditions such as cancer and that it hoped to become one of the top 10 per cent in the next few years.

The organisation also aims to help ease the pressure on A&E by continuing to work to bring down the amount of people taken to the county’s acute hospitals who could be more appropriately dealt with elsewhere.