Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what criteria his Department plans to use to assess Primary Care Networks’ engagement with local communities.

For Primary Care Networks (PCNs) to be successful they will need to work in partnership with local people and the communities they serve. NHS England does have a statutory duty to undertake an annual assessment of clinical commissioning groups’ (CCGs) performance, as part of the CCG Improvement and Assessment Framework (IAF). One of the indicators assessed is patient and community engagement. All NHS service providers, including general practitioner practices, have legal duties to engage with local authority health scrutiny about changes which may be considered substantial. These duties which currently apply to NHS service providers and commissioners around engagement and consultation will continue to be valid.

Further information on the IAF is available on the NHS England website at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/commissioning/regulation/ccg-assess/

Results from the assessments are published on ‘MyNHS’ at the following link:

https://www.nhs.uk/service-search/performance-indicators/organisations/ccg-year-end-2015-assurance-assessment

The assessments made are in line with the document ‘Patient and public participation in commissioning health and care: statutory guidance for CCGs and NHS England’, which is at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/publication/patient-and-public-participation-in-commissioning-health-and-care-statutory-guidance-for-ccgs-and-nhs-england/