Commissioning for Value increases effectiveness
EFFECTIVENESS
Since 2010, the UK government has pushed a line of
COMMISSIONING FOR VALUE IN THE UK’S NHS
reforms through the National Healthcare System – the NHS. This has led to heated debate and negative cri-
INITIATOR
tique of some of the resolutions. The report “The NHS
funded healthcare system
under the coalition government” from the UK-based
INVOLVED ACTORS
The Clinical Commissioning Groups PRIMARY DRIVER
Measuring the value of healthcare – benchmarking the performance with the best SCALE
England TYPE OF CHANGE
Using performance measurement as a vehicle for improving healthcare
... TO ACTION IN ENGLAND
Policy makers and publicly
King’ Fund, published this year, concludes that the reforms “have resulted in top-down reorganization of the NHS and this has been distracting and damaging” and “new systems of governance and accountability resulting from the reforms are complex and confusing.” 38 Despite the clear downsides of the reforms, it is not all bad. The development of the NHS over the past few years also entails stories of success and improvements. One such story is the “Commissioning for Value Initiative,” in which knowledge about performance and the identification of specific possibilities for improvements are used as drivers for creating better outcomes, higher quality and more efficient healthcare. The Commissioning for Value initiative is a collaboration between NHS Right Care, NHS England and Public Health England. It is aimed directly at the 211 Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCG) in the NHS – which are groups of primarily general practitioners that work together to plan and design local health services throughout England. The initiative gathers and shares a series of information on each CCG’s performance and identifies a series of different areas and healthcare services that have unexploited potential in terms of improving the delivered healthcare. These results help each local CCG decide ‘where to look’ and ‘what to do’ in order to improve outcomes and increase the quality of their healthcare service.
The King’s Fund. The NHS under the coalition government. 2015. 38
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