NICE support for commissioning

Clinical commissioning groups in the new NHS

The 2012 Health and Social Care Act puts general practitioners at the forefront of radical changes to the way that NHS services are commissioned.

The Act also puts NICE at the heart of plans for the NHS and social care. The emphasis on outcomes requires careful analysis of the evidence for effective - and cost effective - practice, something NICE is well placed to support through our work.

There are many ways that we can help clinical commissioning groups, from practical commissioning guides to advice on the use of social value judgements in resource prioritisation.

Over the next few months we will be providing a range of tools and documents that will be of interest to commissioners, and we will continue to adapt and update these resources as policy develops.

Commissioning guidance

NICE Pathways can be used to browse all relevant NICE recommendations, quality standards and commissioning advice quickly and easily, within a clinical topic or condition.

NICE is working with the Department of Health to inform the development of commissioning guides to accompany our quality standards. These will be available here, as they are published.

In the meantime, NICE has produced its own commissioning guides to support certain pieces of guidance, to help ensure that services are planned and delivered using the best available evidence. These web-based guides include advice on key clinical and service-related issues to consider during the commissioning process, and a set of spreadsheet templates to enable you to calculate the cost impact of various service delivery options.

Referral advice

All of NICE's current primary-to-secondary referral advice from our clinical guidelines, cancer service guidance and public health guidance is available in our referral advice database.

Cost saving

Our list of cost-saving guidance contains a list of recommendations that we consider deliver savings or may free up resources and capacity that can be used for other services

NHS Evidence - QIPP is a collection of evidence to support quality and productivity at a local level, providing users with real examples of how staff are improving quality and productivity across the NHS and social care.

What to stop, as well as start, doing

Our guidance often identifies NHS clinical practices that we recommend should be discontinued completely, or not used routinely. This may be due to evidence that the practice is not, on balance, beneficial, or a lack of evidence to support its continued use. The NICE 'do not do' recommendations database contains all of these recommendations made since 2007.

Prioritising resources

A new role for clinical commissioning groups will be their involvement in the difficult task of prioritising finite NHS resources. NICE has lots of experience in this area, and our publication Social Value Judgements outlines the principles NICE uses in developing guidance.

Local support from NICE

NICE has a field team of locally-based implementation consultants whose role is to:

• meet with local organisations and networks to encourage the development of an evidence-based approach to commissioning and providing health and social care
• learn about the barriers and obstacles to evidence based practice, and ensure that NICE is aware of these
• gather examples of success and good practice to share with other organisations
• promote the wide range of support that NICE provides, to improve the uptake and use of evidence to improve practice

The field team regularly meet individual clinical commissioning groups to talk about how NICE can be of help.

If you would like arrange a visit, contact your local consultant or ring the field team coordinator on 0161 870 3271. To find your local consultant, use the Field Team map.

More information about commissioning in the NHS

There are a range of external resources available

• The NHS Commissioning Board and Department of Health websites contains information for clinical commissioning groups.
• The DH have produced a fact sheet on Clinical Commissioning Groups [pdf]
• The finance and planning section contains information on NHS and social care finances and planning, including payment by results, the rules-based system for paying trusts, and the planning framework.