Norman Lamb – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Norman Lamb on 2016-03-14.
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what assessment he has made of the potential effect of the removal of mental health quality premium measures in NHS England’s Quality Premium Guidance 2016-17 on mental health outcomes.
Alistair Burt
The 2016/17 Quality Premium (QP) scheme has been designed to support the delivery of the major priorities for the National Health Service, as set out in the Five Year Forward View and in the NHS Mandate. The QP scheme is reviewed annually, with the intention of having a range of high impact measures addressing a range of priorities across the Five Year Forward View.
However, there is scope for clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) to focus on mental health, if this is a local priority area in 2016/17. Each CCG is expected to select three local indicators from a menu of suitable measures aligned to the Right Care programme, which sets out a clinically led methodology for improvement and reducing variation in care. This menu includes 17 mental health indicators.
The QP scheme is a part of NHS England’s wider incentive system, including the Commissioning for Quality and Innovation scheme, which includes an incentive focussing on improving the physical health for patients with severe mental illness.
As the QP will be retaining mental health as an indicator there has been no new assessment of the effect of removing.
While there have not yet been any formal meetings with mental health charities about this, following the Mental Health Taskforce report, NHS England are keen to work with stakeholders-including mental health charities- to develop a new and robust mental health indicator for potential inclusion in the 2017/18 QP. This will align with the additional funding to drive improvements in ‘Improved Access to Psychological Therapies’ access from April 2017.
