MANAGEMENT
D Building the foundations
evolving
commissioning power to primary care
clinicians for healthcare services aims to improve productivity, outcomes and quality of services. In some areas of the country, achieving these outcomes will be a monumental challenge for GP consortia tasked with the job.
Many factors will affect the success of GP consortia commissioning but undoubtedly these will include local leadership and commissioning intelligence available from primary care trusts.
When individuals are informed their job role is to be phased out and their organisation is to be dissolved they start to become disaffected. With this comes a reduction in productivity and standards. If GP consortia commissioning is to stand a chance of being successful, staff must understand their crucial role in setting foundations for the future and kept motivated.
Leadership is going to be essential and should not be seen as only the role of the director of commissioning. Trust board members have a crucial role to fulfil and must be seen to embrace and lead this change. Boards must also ensure that everyday business continues during the period of transition.
Ensuring that organisation memory will not be lost is as important as leadership. Everyone working in the NHS has, for sure, experienced staff members moving on to new jobs and crucial pieces of intelligence moving on with them. This becomes manageable when it is one staff member but has the ability to significantly destabilise commissioning when large numbers of staff are moving
14 nhe
on to new roles or leaving the system completely.
Commissioning teams have a responsibility to package all commissioning intelligence in a format that ensures organisational intelligence is passed on in a format that the recipient can easily interpret. This information must include commissioning basics such as local health needs assessments; service specifications; contracts or service level agreements; and performance reports.
However, it is as essential that intelligence also includes details of how commissioning priorities were determined; local groups and organisations who have been involved in supporting and informing the commissioning of services; and outcomes from work that has been undertaken to test the market prior to the procurement of services.
Thinking about the task ahead, the easy solution would be for primary care trust commissioners to ‘move over’ to GP consortia commissioning.
This may well be the ideal solution in some parts of the country but in other parts of the country this would immediately limit the future success of GP consortia commissioning.
Other solutions to devolving commissioning intelligence must be found in those areas of the country where, for example: local health needs assessments do not incorporate perceived health needs of the local community and stakeholders and are not used to inform commissioning priorities and account back to the local population; partnership working is not embedded; service specifications, contracts and service level agreements focus on activity targets only and are not led by health outcomes; and the
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Sharon Willis Director
Connecting Quality Consultancy Solution Ltd and Connecting Quality Development Solutions Ltd
T: 07753 937 066 E:
sharonwillis@connecting-quality.co.uk W:
www.cqcs.co.uk W:
www.cqds.co.uk
Sep/Oct 10
performance of the big contract holders only has been the focus of the commissioning team.
Of course, it cannot be denied that establishing a commissioning organisation from scratch is a high risk strategy itself. Where it is necessary, GP consortia brave enough to take on this challenge must not delay in gaining a comprehensive understanding of commissioning underpinned by health outcomes. This will enable those involved in GP consortia commissioning to determine the skills and competencies required locally to deliver the outcomes set out by the government and build a solid and committed team based on this intelligence.
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