Our local 111 urgent care and advice telephone service is being recommissioned. You can help shape the future service by taking part in a consultation meeting on 13th September from 9.00am to 1.00pm at the Holiday Inn, Basingstoke Road, Reading, RG2 0SL. At the consultation meeting the preferred provider of the new service - Care UK - will present its vision and take feedback and input from the meeting attendees. Care UK is one of the UK's largest private providers of health care services.

The NHS is now setting out its plans for the next five years when spending increases will be well below demand. In 44 Sustainability and Transformation Plan "footprints" (areas) CCGs and NHS providers are formulating plans to cope with the stress to come. (We are in the Western Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire STP area known as BOB/WeBOB/COBWeB).

We will be discussing patient engagement in the NHS with the new lay member of the South Reading CCG Governing Body, Wendy Bower and Nikki Malin, in charge of comms support for Berkshire West CCGs. The meeting is from 6.00pm to 7.45 pm on Wednesday, 20th July 2016, at the Reading Community Learning Centre, 94, London Street, RG1 4SJ. There will also be news from PPGs and from the CCG.

Reading Borough Council's Health and Wellbeing Board - which has a remit to bring together the local health and social care economy - is holding an extra meeting at short notice at 6pm on Tuesday, 14th June 2016 in Committee Rooms 4A and 4B at the Civic Offices. The meeting appears to be to review plans which are due to be finalised before the next planned meeting.

By withdrawing its offer to sell land at 17, Craven Road the Royal Berks Hospital Trust has stopped a project to build a multi-practice, high-facility GP medical centre in south-east Reading. The primary care strategy for South Reading CCG area (most of Reading south of the Thames) envisages collaborations and mergers between GP practices to meet increased demand and patient expectations for services and access. Patients can benefit when doctors specialise and share the responsibilities of running a practice. And patients could use a broader range of services out of hospital.