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I hope everyone’s having a good start to 2025, you will all no doubt be super busy as we support thousands of people across the country to adopt healthy new year habits!
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There are a few updates I would like to share with you. Firstly, this week we have unfortunately had to break the news to some members of our central and digital teams that we are proposing to reduce the size and number of these teams.

For some time, we have been ‘over-spending’ on our central resources, due to the huge amount of work required to develop our digital software and mobilise numerous new contracts at the same time. Some of the new contracts, notably the NHS Diabetes Prevention Programme (which is a 100% tariff-based contract- ie we get paid per client, when they start a programme), have taken much longer to get going than planned and the funding coming in has not matched our increased spend. This has been exacerbated by our Oxfordshire and Bi-Borough contracts coming to an end.
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Over the coming weeks we will be working with our central and digital teams to re-shape our central functions and this may result in some team members leaving the organisation or fulfilling different roles. Please be aware if you work with any central or digital team members that they may be going through a challenging time, and down the line these teams will also have less resource.
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I want to assure you that team members in frontline services will not be affected at all by this, and service budgets will remain the same. We will be briefing Heads of Service, so they are fully in the loop, in the meantime if any of you have any questions please do reach out.
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In better news, I’m delighted to report that we have been awarded the contract to provide the Hampshire and the Isle of Wight Stop Smoking Service! The contract will start in April 2025, we will tell you more about the service and our plans a bit nearer the time. We hope that this creates opportunities for some of the team members who are impacted by the situation I have detailed above.  
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Thanks, Tim.

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