The coalition Government’s white paper, Equity and excellence: liberating the NHS, has thrown the spotlight on GP commissioners with its proposal to make GP-led organisations responsible for managing the vast majority of NHS commissioning budgets by April 2013.
While the proposal to fully transfer commissioning responsibilities
from PCTs to GP consortia marks a significant organisational change, PCTs and GPs have been pursuing the principles of clinically-led commissioning for some time. Whatever the detail of the Government’s policy looks like post-consultation, local health economies will need to accelerate their progress in turning these principles into practice. In this context, both GPs and primary care trust (PCT) staff have indicated an analysis of how some of the most advanced GP commissioning organisations have achieved their goals under practice-based commissioning (PBC) would be useful in helping local health economies to avoid ‘reinventing the wheel’.
This discussion paper has been produced using information gathered from interviews in four different areas with GPs and PCT staff who have worked together on GP commissioning. In each area, a GP commissioning organisation has been successfully established and is now redesigning aspects of care and making decisions that affect how NHS funds are spent.
It explores how GPs, managers and other colleagues have been able to overcome barriers to progress and seeks to establish what learning has arisen that will be of use to GPs and managers in other localities as they increase their activity around GP commissioning.