New Thames Valley NHS care board will bring significant redundancies, warns boss

Nick Broughton, the current chief executive of BOB and Frimley ICBs, told a joint health overview and scrutiny committee that major changes were ahead.

He said there was still a lot of work to do to establish the new ICB and that maintaining staff morale during the transition would be a challenge.

“The decrease in running costs is significant, about 50 per cent, and therefore we are looking at a large number of redundancies,” he said.

“So maintaining the morale of the organisation at the same time as delivering for today and planning for tomorrow is a significant challenge.

“There is a lot to do. It is a major piece of work. I am very conscious of the fact that this piece of work will result in a number of our colleagues’ roles being made redundant.”

He described the current scale of change the NHS is experiencing as the greatest it has been since its inception.

He added: “There is a huge amount going on at a national level, a regional level and an ICB level and soon we’ll see that at a provider level.

“We are currently in the midst of an executive consultation to recruit the new Thames Valley executive team.

“That will be a smaller team than the current BOB executive team, in keeping with the fact that we have to reduce our running costs significantly and have an organisation that runs according to a financial calculation based on £19 per head of population.”

He said that he did not underestimate the challenge ahead to create the new ICB, but that the creation of the new board “makes sense.”

He said: “I do think there is a huge amount of potential for the new Thames Valley ICB.

“The very fact that we will be covering geography that makes sense, that people recognise, that is coterminous with a number of other geographies, will enable us to have a good deal more traction than perhaps we have had historically.

“All the real challenges we faced with BOB were that it was such an artificial construct which probably made sense to some people in the rarefied atmosphere of NHS leadership but probably didn’t make sense to many other people.”

The new Thames Valley Integrated Care Board, which will be formally launched in April 2026, will serve around 2.6 million people across Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire.

It will aim to improve the health of the Thames Valley population and decide how best to use its £5.6 billion budget.