Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire may seem an unlikely hotbed of revolution, but under the leadership of Dr Graham Jackson, the CCG is setting the pace for co-commissioning in England. As chair of NHS Aylesbury Vale CCG, Dr Jackson sparked Pulse headlines when his CCG offered local practices the chance to drop the unplanned admissions DES and certain elements of the QOF. The plans came as Dr Jackson’s CCG took on joint responsibility for general practice commissioning alongside the local area team in April.
Speaking at the Pulse Live conference in March, Dr Jackson explained how the CCG wanted to generate more information about the quality of care planning, rather than spending lots of money on ‘achieving very little’. Instead, practices were asked to review the advance care plans of 0.5% of the practice population and register patient preferences on end-of-life care.
GPs were also offered the chance to opt out of diabetes-related QOF domains, and receive payment at their level of achievement last year and potentially 20% on top, in exchange for running CCG-funded staff training on long-term conditions care planning.
He says of his CCG: ‘We recognise we need to facilitate primary care to find new ways of working. We need to do this within the current budget and we are looking at the possibilities in co-commissioning.’
This approach seems to have worked, with the CCG recently found to have improved in nearly all areas.
