Details of the NHS Confederation's work programmes for acute trusts:

Finance, productivity and efficiency

We are continuing to ensure that policy makers, the media, politicians and other stakeholders understand the realities of NHS financial issues and the extent to which they require bold strategic change. We will be aiming to feed in the views of acute trusts into the spending review.

We have commissioned Tribal and York Health Economics Consortium to identify the approaches members are using to improving productivity and efficiency. We will be providing a range of events and publications to share good practice. Part of our programme is to remind policy makers of the complexity of the task and to press for large scale reform to be pursued rather than year-on-year efficiency savings.

Inappropriate methods of measuring productivity that focus on simple activity have potentially perverse effects. We have been working to influence the development of more effective measures.

System reform, Payment by Results (PBR), code of conduct and tariff

We are currently working on the issue of the effect of changes in the tariff and specialist top up. At this stage we are very keen to hear from any of our members who have comments on this topic. Please send any comments you may have to nigel.edwards@nhsconfed.org.

You can find more information on the work we are doing on Payment by Results in the Our work section of this website.

Earlier this year we established a reference group to identify the emerging lessons from the implementation of PBR and the operation of the code of conduct . Lessons from the group were fed into the development of policy.

Meeting key policymakers

We will be stepping up our work programme of arranging contact between key policy makers and leaders from the acute sector. This will include regular meetings with David Nicholson, quarterly meetings with policy makers developing system reform and other policies, and ad-hoc meetings on emerging policy issues.

PFI and capital regimes

The PFI and capital regimes need to be reviewed to be fit for purpose in the reformed health system. We have been working with members, the Treasury, Department of Health and others to develop an approach to capital funding and PFI that is better adapted to the new world.

White Paper on out-of-hospital care

There are significant implications of the White Paper on out-of-hospital care for hospital services and there is a danger that the movement of work from hospitals will move income without reducing costs. We will be working to ensure that the views of acute trusts are reflected in the implementation of the White Paper.