commissioning

Commissioning in the NHS is the process of ensuring that the health and care services provided effectively meet the needs of the population. It is a complex process with responsibilities ranging from assessing population needs, prioritising health outcomes, procuring products and services, and managing service providers.

Our commissioning Blogs

Trying targets: did Local Area Agreements support social cohesion?

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Jenny Fisher asks if the Local Area Agreement policy intervention and associated targets helped with social cohesion and offers useful pointers for further reading on the topic.

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How can commissioners improve the mental health and wellbeing of children and young people?

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Alison Turner summarises the Department of Health’s Future in Mind report, which builds on the work of the Children & Young People’s Mental Health Taskforce and sets out a vision for increased coordination and collaboration to improve mental health and wellbeing in children and young people.

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Faith, charity and public sector delivery: a match made in heaven?

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Robin Miller examines a US research study on faith based organisations delivering social care services and considers what the findings might mean for the UK context.

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Mental health support for older adults needs to improve

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Previous research shows that low education, hypertension, smoking and diabetes may all have causal associations with dementia.

Dave Steele summarises an NIHR funded mixed methods study that concludes we don’t know much about how we should support older adults with mental health problems, except to say that we should be doing better.

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Commissioning to address mental health ethnic inequalities

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Caroline De Brun highlights the new guidance for commissioners of mental health services for people from black and minority ethnic communities, produced by the Joint Commissioning Panel for Mental Health.

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Cost effectiveness analysis finds stepped care to be cheaper and more effective than CBT for bulimia nervosa

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Bulimia nervosa (BN) is an eating disorder; the diagnosis of which requires: persistent preoccupation with eating and an irresistible craving for food, episodes of overeating in which large amounts of food are consumed over a short period of time and potentially attempts to counteract the “fattening” effects of food by self-induced vomiting or laxative abuse. [read the full story…]

New mental health commissioning guides from JCPMH

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Some doctors are reluctant to talk to patients about reducing their use of prescription drugs, even if they know there is no longer a medical reason for continued use.

Those lovely people at the Joint Commissioning Panel for Mental Health (JCP-MH) have published four new guides to help those of you involved in commissioning community specialist services, older people’s services, inpatient and crisis home treatment and services for people with learning disabilities. These guides are short (around 20 pages), readable and nicely summarised with ten [read the full story…]

NICE publish dementia commissioning guide: practical advice for commissioners

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NICE have published a new guide to help commissioners provide evidence-based care for people with dementia. Providing care for our ageing population seems not to have been out of the news in recent years and rightly so, especially as the headline stories are frequently not positive. A recent Care Quality Commission report found that people [read the full story…]

More guides to help GPs commission mental health services

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Do you tell your patients with knee osteoarthritis to exercise?

A year ago I blogged about the new mental health commissioning guides that the Joint Commissioning Panel for Mental Health (JCP-MH) had published for GPs. The JCP-MH is a collaboration between public sector organisations, charities and professional bodies. Their aim is to “inspire commissioners to improve mental health and wellbeing, using a values based commissioning [read the full story…]

Personal health budgets get the green light following positive independent evaluation

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Personal health budgets will be rolled out to thousands more people across England over the next 18 months. The scheme, which allows patients to choose between standard NHS community care or a budget to spend on services and goods of their choice, has been extensively piloted over the last 3 years and has generally been [read the full story…]