Mar 2018: Understanding primary care co-commissioning: Uptake, development, and impacts. Final report
The Health and Social Care Act 2012 gave the power and responsibility for commissioning health services and budgets to groups of GP practices called Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs). CCGs will commission the great majority of NHS services for their patients but will not be directly responsible for commissioning services that GPs themselves provide. The responsibility for commissioning primary care services (medical, dental, eye health, and pharmacy) was given to a new statutory organisation called NHS England (NHSE), known as the NHS Commissioning Board in statute. This was to ensure a more standardised model and consistency in the management of the four groups.
In May 2014, following Simon Stevens appointment as the Chief Executive of NHS England, CCGs were delegated the responsibilities to commission primary care services. This was to enable better integrated care outside hospitals, ensure that primary, community and mental health are properly resourced, and CCGs having more influence over how funding is invested for local population, which would ensure sustainability of their local NHS. Co-commissioning would also enable the development of new models of care such as multispecialty community providers (MCPs) and primary and acute care systems (PACSs), as set out in the NHS Five Year Forward View.
This report presents the findings from a study following the development of Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) in England. This is the third phase of the project, which aims to understand the ways in which CCGs are responding to their new primary care co-commissioning responsibilities from April 2015, providing feedback to NHSE supporting CCGs going through the approval process.
The study provides detailed evidence about the experiences of CCGs as they took on delegated responsibility for primary care commissioning. The study took place between May 2015 to June 2017. The strength of this study lies in the bringing together of evidence from senior policy makers as to the overall objectives for the policy with both telephone survey and case study evidence as to how it is playing out in practice. The specific research questions addressed in this report are:
- What is the scope of co-commissioning activity and the process of change?
- What approaches have been taken by CCGs to:
- Develop governance structure to oversee primary care co-commissioning?
- Commissioning and contracting?
- Manage and develop the relationships between CCGs and their membership and between CCGs and external stakeholders?
- Manage conflicts of interest?
- What are the impacts and outcomes CCGs would expect from taking on delegated responsibility and claims of early successes?
- What factors have affected CCGs’ progress and development?