NHS Commissioning Board starts to manage change

Today came the announcement that the NHS Commissioning Board (NHS CB) is now in operation. So in 15 months time the Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) will disappear and the commissioning of patient services will pass to the Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) steered by the newly created NHS CB.

Of course this is subject to the usual disclaimer about the passage of Andrew Lansley’s Health and Social Care Bill. Failure to pass the Bill means all bets are off!

The magnitude and pace of the change is hugely challenging.  The NHS CB has to ensure that each of over four hundred CCGs are equipped to handle the commissioning of services, a role previously carried out by the PCTs.

This creates at least two major tasks for the Commissioning Board:

• Ensuring GP practices engage with their customers
• Helping to embed the commissioning skills, currently held in the PCTs, into the Clinical Commissioning Groups

In this blog I will address the first of these tasks, engaging customers. In future blogs I will return to the commissioning aspects.

Ensuring GP practices engage with their customers
The original reason given for making the NHS changes was to put the patients at the heart of decision making. It is going to be fascinating to observe how the Commissioning Board goes about encouraging each CCG (typically made of 15-20 GP practices) to create “public and patient engagement (PPE)”. This is required by each CCG in order to be approved by the NHS CB. Righttrack has significant experience of delivering both customer service training and management training and so can appreciate the scale of the change. Creating an “engagement” culture from scratch amongst 10,000 GP practices will be a big task in itself for all those involved. Management skills will be tested to the limit.

Many GP practices are not known for leading edge customer service and some actively dislike being told by patients that improvements can be made in the approach of their practice. I did some quick data analysis on the NHS choices website, which allows patients to give feedback on individual GP practices. Nearly 60% of all practices had either 0 or 1 comment from patients on the website. 86% of all practices had fewer than 5 comments from patients. Hardly a demonstration that GP’s were looking for feedback, be it good or bad.

Now it could be argued that there is little awareness of the NHS choices website (http://www.nhs.uk/) so input from patients is understandably limited to those who feel very strongly about registering comments about their GP. That is a fair point but again if GP’s are not using this route to get feedback from patients then what other methods are they using? The good news is that, by my calculations, over 56% of those making a comment on the choices website would recommend their GP practice to a friend. With the Commissioning Board encouraging PPE then, if GP’s listen and make the necessary changes, then I could see this figure climbing rapidly. However there will be a huge management culture issue to overcome as some GP’s get used to listening to their patients.

The NHS CB will certainly need to use a combination of bottom up and top down approaches to unlock the engagement and culture issues. I will follow their progress with interest and maybe offer my own opinions on how they should proceed in future blogs.

By Jon Davies| Righttrack’s Digital Marketing Manager