Three new NICE Commissioning Guides

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has published three new commissioning guides to help the NHS in England effectively commission evidence-based care for patients. The guides cover services for:

• Accurate diagnosis of the epilepsies in adults
• Antenatal and postnatal mental health
• Peer support for women who breastfeed

Guides also due for publication before the end of the year will cover services for:

• Obits media with effusion
• Patient education for people with type 2 diabetes
• Smoking cessation for people having elective surgery
• Diagnosis and initial management of stroke
• Diagnosis and initial management of transient ischaemic attack
  

Each commissioning guide signposts and provides topic-specific information on key clinical and service-related issues to consider during the commissioning process. They also offer an indicative benchmark of activity to help commissioners determine the level of service needed locally. Within each commissioning guide, an interactive commissioning tool provides data for local comparison against the benchmark and resources to estimate and inform the cost of commissioning intentions. NICE has updated population, activity and tariff data presented within the 15 commissioning tools already published. The ‘one stop’ resource now brings together more recently available data and will help users review current commissioning activity and make robust commissioning decisions to improve the range and quality of health services available to patients.

Tutorial for using commissioning tool.

Making commissioning effective in the reformed NHS in England

Successive Department of Health (DH) initiatives have sought to achieve widespread, sustained service reconfiguration in the NHS, aiming to deliver patient-centred services closer to where people live and work. This has proven to be extremely challenging, and the DH has concluded that fundamental reforms to NHS commissioning are necessary to drive change. Effective commissioning will assure service users and tax payers that those who configure and contract health services on their behalf are doing so in a manner that achieves the best possible health outcomes and provides value for money. But what is effective commissioning: what does it look like? This is the question the Health Policy Forum recently asked the Health Services Management Centre and the King’s Fund to investigate. The resulting report 'Making commissioning effective in the reformed NHS in England' will enable commissioners to benchmark and help Strategic Health Authorities and others to performance manage commissioners. We believe it constitutes a useful contribution to the ongoing debate on NHS reform.

(Published December 06, 54 pages)