NHS England published a set of guidance last week in relation to the PCN DES.  One specific piece of guidance was detail on how the new Investment and Impact Fund (IIF) is going to work.

The IIF has the feel of one of those initiatives that probably started out as a good idea, but has been watered down so much in the making of it a reality that its impact is likely to be minimal.

For a start, the sums we are talking about pale into insignificance when compared to some of the other funds on offer to PCNs.  An “average” PCN can earn a maximum of £21,534 in this year’s IIF.  Compare that with the c£350,000 (£7.131 per weighted patient (pwp)) the average PCN has received through the Additional Role Reimbursement Scheme, or even the £75,000 (£1.50 pwp) core PCN funding.  These sums require very little effort from the PCN.

PCNs have already received  c£13,500 (£0.27 per weighted patient) for the six months up to the end of September as a Covid “support payment” for the PCN.  The question, then, is whether the £21,534 available between October 1^st and March 31^st is going to be sufficient to entice PCNs into action, particularly in the context of everything else that is going on.

It depends to some extent on how achievable the targets are.  The scheme is designed like a QOF scheme, but at a PCN rather than practice level.  There are 194 IIF “points” available, each worth £111 each (adjusted for list size and prevalence).  These points are divided across 6 indicators.  For each indicator there are limits outside of which practices either earn zero or the maximum, with a sliding scale applied in between:

It will be hard for any individual practice to achieve the 75% flu vaccination target, let alone 77%.  It will be even more difficult for a whole PCN to achieve it. A non-guaranteed incentive payment of less than £8,000 is not going to change behaviour.  PCNs may well work very hard to achieve as high a vaccination coverage as possible for their local population, but it will be because they want to protect their local population, not because of the IIF.

Even if a PCN does examine the scheme and thinks the rewards could be worth the effort, there are further barriers to overcome.  To earn any IIF funding, a PCN must first “commit in writing to the commissioner that it will reinvest the total achievement payment into additional workforce and/or primary medical services” (2.15).

I find this astonishing.  The IIF funding is not recurrent (it has to be re-earnt each year) but the cost of any additional staff or service delivery is, so how is this supposed to work as an incentive? Equally, if a PCN invests in extra resources to achieve these targets it does not seem as if they can refund their own outlay with any money earned.

We will have to wait and see how these restrictions are applied in practice (e.g. whether any earned IIF funding can be applied retrospectively, whether it can be used to fund on-costs of additional staff not covered by ARRS funds etc).  Hopefully common sense will prevail.  Either way, it seems that either the policy should be to create incentives and allow PCNs the freedom to innovate to achieve them, and the freedom to use those incentives as it sees fit, or it should abandon any notion of payment for performance (which is what this scheme at its heart is) and stick with fixed payments for expected deliverables.  As it stands, this scheme neither promotes investment nor looks like it will have much impact.