Stevens sets out fresh NHS funding approach

5 Jun 14
NHS England will increasingly link funding to prevention, care quality and patient feedback, its new chief executive has said.

In his address to the NHS Confederation conference in Liverpool yesterday, Simon Stevens said the health service was at a ‘defining moment’ in its history.

‘I know there are enormous pressures, but the NHS is up for change, and necessity truly is the mother of invention,’ he said.

‘Great effort has gone into analysing the challenges. People now want to get on with developing solutions.’

He highlighted three approaches the NHS would now be taking. The first of these would focus on ensuring the health and social care system was improving its value for money by getting more ‘bangs for the buck’.

Current performance incentives for community and acute providers, GPs and clinical commissioning groups would now be subject to a ‘hard-nosed’ review, Stevens said.

‘More broadly, across all NHS-funded services, we’ll be pushing for steadily increasing proportion of payments tied to performance, quality and outcomes. And different approaches to sharing utilisation risk for particular services along the spectrum, from volume-based payments at one end through to delegated capitated budgets [based on registered patient numbers] at the other.

‘We’ll be using a combination of evidence from the NHS’s past experiences, new local experiments and learning from established international commissioners to calibrate these new commissioning approaches appropriately.’

Secondly, Stevens said there needed to be a radical redesign of the way GPs, hospital, community and social care services work together to end many of the historical demarcations that have persisted since the foundation of the NHS in 1948.

Thirdly, he called for the NHS to be at forefront of the ‘coming revolution in personalised medicine, the use of data to drive transparency and proactive care and the full engagement of patients in their own care’.

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