Plans are being made to enable clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) to replace the quality and outcomes framework (QOF) to enable further control over the allocation of primary care.
Dr Graham Jackson, clinical chair at NHS Aylesbury Vale CCG and a member of the group that developed the co-commissioning plans, said that details about CCGs replacing QOF were deliberately ‘a bit vague’ while waiting for CCGs to put plans together.
However he did add that this would allow a number of opportunities to bundle incentives together.
Plans are being made to enable clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) to replace the quality and outcomes framework (QOF) to enable further control over the allocation of primary care.
Dr Graham Jackson, clinical chair at NHS Aylesbury Vale CCG and a member of the group that developed the co-commissioning plans, said that details about CCGs replacing QOF were deliberately ‘a bit vague’ while waiting for CCGs to put plans together.
However he did add that this would allow a number of opportunities to bundle incentives together.
“If you take, for example, your diabetes QOF, your heart disease QOF, and other related issues, you could quite easily create an outcomes framework that talks about the improved health and wellbeing’
Somerset CCG has already introduced its own incentive schemes, which rewards practices for their financial sustainability and their ability to share patients records, plans are being made for other CCGs to go even further.
Speaking exclusively to Pulse magazine yesterday, Dr Sarah Schofield Chair of West Hampshire CCG demonstrated her interest in implementing incentive strategies.
She said: “If you want to pull it closer to communities and patients, it seems nonsense to me to separate rewards into a primary and secondary rewards system. You really want to embed the two together, for the patients to get the benefits.
“What we might be interested in saying is, for all our long-term conditions, practices need to have half-hour appointments with patients with specific long-term conditions, and they would have to do that, say, three or four times a year.”
She also believes that merging primary and secondary care incentives ‘is one of the ideas being talked about’ and is currently waiting on NHS approval to do this.
