Tag Archives: clinical commissioning groups

With more money coming to the NHS do we need to rethink how it’s spent?

By Judy Abel | Mon 25th June 2018 - 12:42 pm

While some of the major health think tanks such as The King’s Fund say the announced 3.4% increase in annual NHS spending is not enough – and I would agree with that – can we at least use the additional NHS funding more efficiently? I would say it might be worth looking at changing some long-established patterns of patient care.

Let’s start by looking at primary care. Currently it is estimated that around half of all GP appointments are for just two kinds of conditions – musculoskeletal (MSK) problems (accounting for a fifth of all GP appointments) and mental health problems …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged health spending and NHS | 35 Comments

Opinion: Clinical Commissioning Groups – don’t hold your breath

By Geoff Crocker | Tue 22nd October 2013 - 2:13 pm

We are now 6 months into the much touted reorganisation of the health service, with the advent in April this year of Clinical Commissioning Groups to replace Primary Care Trusts, the only real difference being that GPs run the Clinical Commissioning Groups.

The reorganisation did ensure a reduction in cost by the simple expedient of setting Clinical Commissioning Group administrative budgets one third below historic Primary Care Trust administrative cost, yielding a Clinical Commissioning Group admin cost of £25/head of population. There are 211 Clinical Commissioning Groups. The adjusted population figure is 53.8m, and so total Clinical Commissioning Group admin spend is £1.345bn. Clinical Commissioning Groups are administering a total health budget of £60bn, averaging £284m per Group. Clinical Commissioning Group admin costs are therefore 2.24% of total health service expenditure.