News / NHS England to lead on QIPP efforts

NHS England is to take a lead role in delivering QIPP (quality, innovation, productivity and prevention) savings, with a focus on supporting the transformation of service delivery.

The commissioning body’s business plan for the next three years, Putting patients first (tabled at its April board meeting) said QIPP would remain a key challenge for the commissioning system beyond 2014/15 as resources remain tight and demand continues to rise.

It said NHS England would support clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) to deliver QIPP targets in several ways. Its own direct commissioning would lead the transformation of services, ensuring that outdated service models were not sustained.

NHS England was in the process of establishing the first areas where it would provide leadership and support for all commissioners to innovate and lead transformational change. It will develop a series of tools and guidance to support CCGs to ‘deliver transformational change in relation to their QIPP objectives’. The first six of these resources will be available by September.

CCGs will be given ‘assumed liberty’, rather than being performance managed on the achievement of milestones. Area teams will seek assurance that CCG governance is sufficient to identify and act on their own QIPP challenges. NHS?England will assure CCG QIPP plans are part of the planning process.

The quality premium would be used to reward improvements in outcomes and good financial performance. But a CCG will not receive its quality premium payment if it has overspent.

NHS England’s annual assessment of CCGs and direct commissioners will assess financial performance. And it reiterated that a portion of CQUIN (commissioning for quality and innovation) funding would be used to reward good performance on the friends and family test in 2013/14.