HEALTH watchdogs fear rural communities could lose out under new plans emerging from the NHS.

A key part of NHS planning guidance for the next five years involves dividing North Yorkshire’s clinical commissioning groups between three urbanised regions for the delivery of health care services.

However under the “sustainability and transformational plans” – STPs – it is feared spending could be concentrated in more densely populated areas.

And North Yorkshire’s health scrutiny committee say local services should not be “unduly influenced” by the challenges faced in providing services in the urban areas of Middlesbrough, Leeds, Bradford and Hull.

Chairman Cllr Jim Clark said: “The challenges in these areas are entirely different to those of providing services to the rural and remote communities of North Yorkshire where we have a reliance on medium sized district hospitals, a history of the NHS financial deficits, low local government funding settlements and an underinvestment in community health services.”

In a letter to NHS England for Yorkshire and the Humber, he warned that North Yorkshire’s challenges, which were due to factors associated with sparsity, risked being exacerbated under the new arrangements as funding would be further syphoned into urban areas.

He said they needed assurance that the importance of maintaining a whole-system approach across all aspects of care received a fair share of funding through the CCGs “to address the challenges in this county.”

Cllr Clark added: “It is crucial that the health challenges faced by rural communities are not overlooked in these new place-based arrangements.”