NHS plans for offender commissioning outlined

As part of the restructuring of the health service, the NHS Commissioning Board (CB) will have national responsibility for healthcare in secure environments.

These include:

  • 120 prisons
  • 16 Secure Children’s Homes
  • 4 Secure Training Centres
  • 12 Immigration Removal Centres
  • Police Custody Suites
  • Courts

Commissioning for Sexual Assault Services will also become the responsibility of the NHS CB.

Whilst the NHS CB has national responsibility for these institutions it will be free to commission services from local providers.

A document on the changes is available here.

Will commissioners respond to feedback?

A date for your editorial diary in the latest briefing from the NHS Commissioning Board, on one specific pledge being made on health services:

“All NHS patients should have the opportunity to leave feedback, in real time, on any service, by 2015. This will start with roll out of a friends-and-family test to see if patients would recommend a hospital to those to whom they are closest. Clinical commissioners will need to demonstrate they have responded.”

This is a concrete marker to track in holding the new system to account. Worth making a note in your diary!

What standard to hold health service providers to? A consultation to watch

Consultations are always useful sources of information, background, and analysis of a particular sector. The NHS Commissioning Board recently launched a consultation on “service specifications and clinical policies”. These, they say, are “important in clearly defining what the NHS Commissioning Board expects to be in place for providers to offer evidence-based, safe and effective services.” Most importantly:

“Core standards are those that any reasonable provider of safe and effective services should be able to demonstrate, with developmental standards being those that really stretch services over time to provide excellence in the field.”

So this is about what standards we will hold providers of health services to.  Continue reading

NHS Commissioning Board livestreams its board meetings

Transparency is supposed to be a key element of the new clinical commissioning NHS system – something we’ll be looking closely at. So it’s encouraging to see that the new NHS Commissioning Board has been livestreaming its board meetings, then putting the whole thing up on its own YouTube channel, too.

A useful source if you’re interested in the governance of health – and you can subscribe to that channel in your RSS reader too.

What’s your local CCG doing? A quick guide

Philip John is one of the users of Help Me Investigate looking at his local clinical commissioning group (CCG), for which there isn’t much information (there isn’t even a website).

Here’s why: CCGs are being authorised in four waves, which take place from this month through to March 2013. In addition to those four waves, there are dozens of CCGs which were already operating as ‘pathfinder’ groups – in other words, pilots.

You can find out which wave your CCG is in by searching for it in this document (PDF). Continue reading

25 clinical commissioning-related accounts on Twitter

Twitter bird icon - CCG twitter links

Having previously identified 20 useful sources for CCG-related news, here are 25 Twitter accounts to follow if you want to know what’s happening with clinical commissioning: Continue reading