NICE Launch New And Updated Guides To Support Effective Commissioning Of Services

Main Category: Public Health
Article Date: 18 Jan 2008 - 1:00 PDT

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

- memory assessment
- hysterectomy
- endometrial ablation
- female urinary incontinence
- intrauterine devices and the intrauterine system
- bariatric surgery.

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 tool provides data for local comparison against the benchmark and resources to estimate and inform the cost of commissioning intentions. The Institute aims to produce up to 10 commissioning guides a year. These will be updated annually, with new releases timed to have maximum impact on the annual commissioning process.

NICE has also updated commissioning tools published last year. Both the updated and new commissioning tools offer enhanced functionality to end users. They now allow commissioners in Strategic Health Authorities (SHA) to log in and view data at Primary Care Trust (PCT) level. GP practices within a commissioning group/cluster can also give other practices in their cluster permission to view their data and to model commissioning intentions for the group.

Dr Carl Parker, General Practitioner, Hartlepool PCT, says: "The good thing about the commissioning guides is that they offer a one-stop resource to help GPs like myself review current activity and plan future commissioning activity to meet local needs, using benchmarks that can be adjusted to reflect local circumstances, and to calculate resources needed. As these guides have quality assurance and are developed with the involvement of primary care clinicians, specialists in the topic area, service commissioners and policy leads, I have confidence that I am not making commissioning decisions on a 'whim' but ones which are based on evidence and best practice."

Nicola J Baker, Associate Director Commissioning, Manchester PCT says: "As practice based commissioning lead for the South Manchester commissioning hub, the guides have been a very useful resource in the development of some of our new services and have been utilised by managers (including business, finance and information staff) and clinical leads from the practice-based commissioning consortium. It's really helpful to have a personal login as it means I can safeguard data on my local population and go back to the commissioning model and work on it at a later date. I would encourage commissioners at other PCTs to make use of them in their planning and commissioning of services. They give a unique insight into the commissioning cycle and, most importantly, give an overview of the outcomes that commissioners can aspire to achieve."

To access the guides go to: http://www.nice.org.uk/CommissioningGuides.

NICE (National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence) is the independent organisation responsible for providing national guidance on the promotion of good health and the prevention and treatment of ill health.

National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence