General Practice and the Transition from Clinical Commissioning to Accountable Care – 1

The NHS is faced with something of a conundrum at present. We have the system of commissioners and providers as laid out in the legislation and statutory architecture, and the system of providers working together as laid out in the Five Year Forward View and STPs. The two are fundamentally different. The conundrum is how to manage the transition from one to another, without any legislation or mandated transition plan.

General practice sits at the very heart of this transition. The new models of care are based on the registered lists of GP practices, yet all the while it remains mandatory for these practices to be part of a CCG. We want GPs to (eventually, at a time yet undetermined) stop doing “commissioning”, and (immediately) to start doing “accountable care”. Unsurprisingly, the early lessons are that general practice needs to be involved in accountable care from the outset.

The transition has of course already started. STP leaders and teams are growing in number and power, and we are starting to see reductions in the number of CCGs and also in the number of CCG Accountable Officers, as CCGs increasingly share management teams. The overall system leaders are no longer exclusively commissioners, and they are grappling with how to make the transition from the existing system to the new one a reality.

At the heart of this transition is the shift of where what I would call the “energy for redesign” comes from. In a commissioner/provider split, the commissioner designs the pathways and ways of working and contracts each provider to deliver their part. Within an accountable care model, the providers work together to redesign the pathways and the interfaces between organisations and clinicians. For me, it is this shift of the energy for redesign from commissioners to providers that is critical to the success of the new system.

If we go back to why we wanted GPs involved in commissioning in the first place, it was because of their unique perspective on the wider healthcare system and how it impacted on their patients, and their ability to use this to drive change for their registered list. Is it any different with accountable care? I don’t think so. We are simply trying to harness the same insights, knowledge and experience within a different system. In truth, we are doing it because the commissioning system has not worked as the driver for the change that the NHS needs.

How, then, do we make this transfer of the energy for redesign from commissioners to providers a reality? How do we empower GPs to start to make the changes we wanted them to make in commissioning, but not through contracts but by building relationships with other providers?

Most places are encouraging the development of federations, or other at-scale general practice vehicles. These are then seen as the GP “providers”, and the sub-structures of commissioning groups, often called localities, are seen as the GP “commissioners”. We then try and talk accountable care and the future with the federations, and commissioning and business-as-usual with the localities. But this has three fundamental problems. First, we are halving the already limited GP capacity available by splitting it between the two. Second, engaging GP federations rather than practices and practice representatives in emerging models of accountable care (unintentionally) limits the general practice input to those activities the federation undertakes and often excludes core general practice. And third, the GPs who have built experience of working in partnership through their CCG work are left in the commissioning camp when they are desperately needed in the accountable care camp.

Dual running general practice as both commissioners and providers suits the system because of the complexity of the current situation, but we are not serving an already overstretched general practice well, and we are diluting the potential impact of the new system right from its very inception. Next time I will explore whether within the transition we can empower general practice to make a fuller shift to the new system earlier, without resorting to the bureaucracy and upheaval of the proposed ACO contract.