Delivery for Commissioners User Guide

A guide designed to help you when you are tasked with the responsibility for leading a project team from project start-up through to successful project delivery. Project Delivery for Commissioners User Guide provides detailed end-to-end guidance for working through the process of setting up and delivering a service change project, as well as for using the extensive range of supporting tools and techniques available from the NHS Institute website. It also provides detail on who should be involved at various points in the process, explains the activities that will need to take place and highlights examples from the health communities who helped design the approach.

Published July 2008

Commissioning to make a bigger difference – A guide for NHS and social care commissioners on promoting service innovation

How do we know that what we plan to do will lead to a service innovation or … make a bigger difference? These guides illustrate methods and tools to help NHS teams answer this question. Using methods and tools that support a specific 5-step process framework, with a special focus on world-class commissioning, and a ‘Culture for Innovation’ section describing seven factors that organisational studies show are linked to innovative output.

(Published June 2008)

Next steps in NHS reform, report of an expert working group

The pace of change and reform in the NHS has been relentless as government and those who work in the NHS seek ways to improve the service. The King’s Fund set up an expert working group to examine how effective the current incentives were in achieving this aim. The group focused on the role of PCTs as commissioners and on practice-based commissioning but discussed other issues, including patient choice. This paper includes specific proposals for government, the Department of Health, strategic health authorities and primary care trusts. These conclusions should feed into Lord Darzi’s review and help to clarify the next steps for the NHS.

(Published June 2008, 40 pages)

Working together for better diabetes care

The national director for diabetes sets out how services are changing to meet the needs of patients, and how they need to change in the future. Clinicians in primary and secondary care need to work together and work in partnership with patients to improve care for people with diabetes.

(Published May 2007, 16 pages)

Conferences

Commissioning and sex education events from National Children's Bureau

Commissioning for Health and Well-being: Incremental steps to achieve transformational change

Health policy: a new look at NHS commissioning

Joan Higgins argues that the way in which commissioning is being developed in the NHS raises serious questions. The current approach is unlikely to activate real change. Geographical restrictions on commissioning should be reconsidered.

BMJ, 2007, vol. 334, no. 7583, p. 22-24