NHS chief executive, Sir David Nicholson has announced that CCGs are already controlling some 50 per cent of the £60 billion commissioning budget.
He told yesterday's NHS Alliance annual conference: ‘Nearly half of the commissioning budget available to the NHS this year is under some control of the CCGs in delegated budgets which I think is a remarkable place to be.
‘There's a variety of ways in which PCTs are doing it with delegating budgets, so half of the budget, £30 billion, is currently in the hands of CCGs and you can already see the benefits of that. ‘
Sir David also made it clear CCGs would decide where their commissioning support came from – once they were authorised.
‘Be absolutely clear CCGs decide themselves, when they're established, when they're authorised where they buy their commissioning support from. I think we can do a little bit more a bit early and get to a place where CCGs can choose between individual PCT clusters because I'm very keen to make that a reality to create that bit more grit in the oyster.'
On CCG size he said some 90 per cent of CCGs now in ‘green/amber' risk rating in terms of their size.
‘There are still some in the red rating. We need to work with those. We need peer review. We need to talk to the NHS Alliance and NAPC how we can get the best outcome for patients and population for those areas. But it's very important that we do it in the right way. The way we do it will in lots of ways determine cultural relationships between CCGs and the NHSCB.
‘I say it's a risk rating but culture turns it into a pass or fail. As we go through this transition from one system to another we need to understand the motivation to work with it. There are lots and lots of people absolutely committed to making this a success.'
