NHS England Board meeting, 15 May 2014
- Quality and clinical risk committee feedback - Item 9g
- Primary Care -
- "The committee was concerned that responsibility for primary care was fragmented ... The committee felt that in order to ensure a coherent approach to commissioning primary care and developing policy in this area, and to facilitate the effective identification and mitigation of risks, it would be important to rationalise the number of groups overseeing this work, and to ensure clarity around the roles of the different directorates involved."
- "The committee felt that in order to maximise the potential of [the Primary Care Web tool] for the purposes of driving quality improvement, it should be more widely available to members of the public."
- "The committee felt that NHS England should support CCGs and Area Teams to find innovative ways to commission integrated care and that NHS England should remove as many barriers to this process as possible, recognising that this would need to be done within existing organisational structures."
- Transforming primary care support services - Item 10
- Primary Care Support (PCS) services include patient record management, admin of primary care lists, primary care contract payment and screening call and recall.
- Key principle to the transformation process:
- safe transfer of services to a new operating model;
- a reduction in administrative costs in line with NHS England’s overall reduction of 40%;
- a national specification with consistent standards and approach;
- delivery in line with our developing strategy for primary care;
- supporting the business needs of stakeholders
- maximising the use of technology; and,
- consultation with the workforce and their representatives.
- The Board will consider options to transform PCS services in its private meeting
- Three principal options are:
- Full market testing with an open public procurement;
- an in-house option in those areas where outsourcing is not currently in place. This option includes significant reduction in the number of staff employed as well as a reduction in the number of sites; or
- an option to outsource all services to SSCL, a joint venture between Steria and the Cabinet office.
- Final decision expected in June.
