Health board merger plans confirmed as Shropshire NHS staff set to receive news on redundancies
An NHS body that commissions more than a billion pounds of healthcare to people in Shropshire is slated to be merged with Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent, a meeting is set to hear.
A meeting this week will be told that the current ‘clustering’ of NHS Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin with Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent is set to be a full ‘merger’ in 2027.
Staff who have been caught up in a government shake up of commissioning bodies will find out soon if their applications for voluntary redundancy have been accepted.
The number of voluntary redundancies that chiefs are looking for has not been announced.
Simon Whitehouse, the new integrated care board (ICB) cluster chief executive, is set to tell his colleagues that it is an “unsettling period for staff”.
“A local voluntary redundancy scheme for staff across NHS Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin Integrated Care Board and NHS Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent Integrated Care Board launched on December 1 and closed on December 22, 2025.”
Mr Whitehouse is set to say that staff who have submitted applications for voluntary redundancy will be informed of decisions soon.
NHS Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin employs about 340 people in commissioning more than £1.447 billion of healthcare services to the local population.
A board meeting on Thursday this week (January 29) is set to be given an update on how the outfit is changing. It currently has its headquarters in Wellington.
NHS England announced in March last year that integrated care boards should reduce their running and programme costs by around 50 per cent to become more efficient and reduce duplication.
But the first meeting of the ‘board in common’ will be told that to “fully realise the efficiencies needed to meet the 50 per cent reduction in running costs, improve collaboration to deliver against the 10-Year Health Plan for England and to facilitate alignment of ICBs to new local government strategic authorities in the future, ICBs are expected to merge, with some exceptions.”
The members of the two current boards will be asked to “endorse and support the direction of travel towards merger”.
The boards at their meeting in Stafford are also asked to confirm that the two existing ICBs be dissolved and a single ICB be created in April 2027.
This single ICB would cover the wider geographical areas of Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin, Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent. A name for the newly formed ICB is yet to be agreed.
