The NHS Alliance is working with six medical specialty organisations to provide a detailed response to the announcement in the Next Stage Review of greater emphasis on integrated care and the implementation of new pilots.

On the face of it, the Darzi Primary Care Strategy entitled “Our Vision for Primary and Community Care” is a charter for reinvigorating primary care commissioning and provision. Many feared that it would attempt to deconstruct primary care and general practice but, in its eventual form, it is a vote of confidence in both and many of the traditional values of primary care such as personal care and continuity. It supports many of the ideas in NHS Alliance’s March 2008 document “In Sickness and in Health”, which advocated greater support for Practice Based Commissioning, innovation funds, enhancing clinical leadership and public involvement and piloting integrated care organisations. Its aspirations are laudable.

The cold of early spring has petrified the landscape. The grass is not growing and trees are late going into leaf. Some parts of the Health Service appear to be equally frozen.

Now that the overwhelming majority of family doctors have voted to provide extra out of hours surgery time, practices and primary care trusts will be able to settle down to sorting out what will best serve patients in their areas.

May 15th NHS Alliance Policy Day and AGM, Imperial War Museum, London September 18th Out of Hours Provider Conference, TUC Congress Centre, London, October 16-17th NHS Alliance Annual Conference in Bournemouth

NHS Alliance has published a manifesto that’s influencing Lord Darzi’s Next Stage Review of the NHS. The Alliance report, In Sickness and in Health, is “a manifesto for a joined up, 21st century health service. An integrated, primary care-led NHS that is shaped around patients and the public, not structures and organisations,” said Alliance chairman, Dr Michael Dixon.

Health Minister Lord Darzi’s coming review of the NHS needs to focus on how primary care can lead the health service. In particular, it must support strengthened practice based commissioning, where local clinicians who know their patients make decisions about the services they need. That is the best way for the NHS to play its role in tackling health inequalities.

NHS workers and associates who want to get a true snapshot of Practice Based Commissioning now have a new on-line resource launched by the NHS Alliance.

By Dr Michael Dixon

February is a bit of a "No Man's Land". It is the lull between a winter that has gone on too long and a spring, which has not yet arrived. It is particularly so this year as far as primary care is concerned.

NHS Alliance is working with stakeholders, Practice Based Commissioning groups and PCTs to develop the ‘competent commissioner’ to provide skills-based learning for practice based commissioners. The programme, which is likely to have up to 11 key modules, is being piloted in two strategic health authority regions before being evaluated and then rolled out nationally. Details are outlined in ‘The Practice Based Commissioning Recipe Book’, which considers what’s really essential to make PBC a success nationally. A key message is the involvement of patients and the need for accurate data. Stakeholders have told NHS Alliance: “We need the data to be accurate, reliable and trustworthy. We need to know it now, not in two or three months’ time.”