Today the NHS Commissioning Board has published a number of documents to further support clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) and the wider NHS in planning for 2013/14. These documents follow the publication earlier this week of Everyone Counts: Planning for Patients 2013/14 which outlined the incentives and levers that will be used to improve services from April 2013 – the first year of the new NHS, where improvement is driven by clinical commissioners.

Supporting Planning 2013/14 for CCGs, the technical guidance for Everyone Counts: Planning for Patients 2013/14, describes the processes that will be used to support planning for the next financial year.  The aim of the document is to support CCGs in ensuring that every plan is as strong as it can be by designing an approach that aims to strike a balance between local determination of priorities and the NHS Commissioning Board’s responsibility for oversight.

Other supporting documents include a near-final draft of the 2013/14 NHS standard contract – the responsibility of which has passed from the Department of Health to the NHS Commissioning Board this year. The contract is for use by commissioners when commissioning healthcare services (other than those commissioned under primary care contracts) and is adaptable for use for a broad range of services and delivery models.

Further documents to support the CCG Outcomes Indicator Set are now also available. These include a table setting out the relationship of the CCG Outcomes Indicator Set with the NHS Outcomes Framework, technical guidance on the CCG Outcomes Indicator Set, setting out definitions of indicators and data sources and a summary factsheet.

Also of interest to CCGs is guidance on the Quality Premium. The Health and Social Care Act 2012 gives the NHS CB powers to reward CCGs for the quality of services they commission, associated outcomes for patients and reductions in inequalities. The Quality Premium will be set at up to £5 per head for each CCG and can be spent as CCGs wish, provided it can be shown to improve services for patients.

Finally, draft guidance on the Commissioning for Quality and Innovation (CQUIN) payment framework has been made available. The CQUIN framework enables commissioners to reward excellence by linking a proportion of a provider’s income to the achievement of local and national quality improvement goals. Some of these will be local priorities and some national, such as improving the care of people with dementia.

All these documents can be found on the Everyone Counts section of the NHS Commissioning Board website.

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