Optometry commissioning

NHS England is responsible for commissioning high quality primary care services for the population of England. NHS England’s commissioning policy is to move towards more place based, clinically led commissioning and is sharing or delegating commissioning of primary medical care services to integrated care boards.

In addition to commissioning primary care services. NHS England has responsibility for commissioning of all dental services including specialist, community and out of hours dental services.

The following documents form part of a suite of policies and procedures to support commissioning and contract management of primary care.

These policies and procedures support quality and consistency of commissioning and eliminate duplication of effort in the management of the four primary care contractor groups

All policies and procedures have been designed to support the principle of proportionality. By applying these policies and procedures, commissioners should be able to respond to local issues within a national framework.

Primary care professional bodies, representatives of patients and the public and other stakeholders were involved in the production of these documents.

The policies are underpinned by five key principles:

  1. To support the continuous improvement of primary care
  2. To maintain the right balance between operating in a consistent fashion, maintaining appropriate local flexibility
  3. Clear alignment with NHS England commissioning policy and NHS England business plan.
  4. Compliance with legislation
  5. To support a reasonable, proportionate and consistent approach across the four primary care contractor groups.

This suite of documents will be refined in light of feedback from users. Please send your feedback to england.dentaloptoms@nhs.net clearly stating in the subject header “Policy feedback: policy name”. This email address should only be used by NHS colleagues and contractors. Members of the public, patients, and their representatives should contact our Customer Contact Centre: england.contactus@nhs.net.

Eye health policies