Speeches

Lord Harrison – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Lord Harrison on 2016-03-01.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is the current primary performance management mechanism through which NHS England hold Clinical Commissioning Groups to account for achieving progress in diabetes service improvement and quality of care.

Lord Prior of Brampton

NHS England and Monitor are working closely together to ensure that the payment system supports service developments in the vanguard sites (including those where integrated diabetes care is a focus) as well as monitoring local innovative approaches to supporting integrated care taken by some clinical commissioning groups (CCGs). This is to ensure that the payment system keeps abreast with the development of future service models and is not a barrier to the development of new models of care.

During 2016/17, NHS England will look at the current incentives and funding arrangements for diabetes to see how greater alignment could be achieved between the financial incentives for primary and secondary care.

Information on how much money the National Health Service invested in structured education for diabetes patients is not collected centrally.

Under the Health and Social Care Act (2012), NHS England has a statutory duty to conduct an annual assessment of every CCG. Since April 2013, CCGs have been assessed twice, for the period 2013/14 and for 2014/15.

For 2016/17, NHS England will introduce a new CCG Improvement and Assessment Framework (CCG IAF). This new framework will align with NHS England’s mandate and planning process, with the aim of driving improvements in a number of key areas including the management and care of people with diabetes.

NHS England has been working with Diabetes UK on including diabetes indicators in the CCG IAF. The proposed diabetes indicators are:

– the percentage of diabetes patients that have achieved all three of the National Institute for Heath and Care Excellence recommended treatment targets; and

– newly diagnosed diabetes patients referred to, or attending, a structured education course.

Under the proposals, diabetes will also be one of the six clinical priority areas in the CCG IAF that will be overseen by an independent group.

The CCG IAF proposals are subject to the outcome of an engagement process which closed for comments on February 26 2016. More information can be found at:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/commissioning/ccg-improvmnt/