Health Services
(asked on 6th January 2017) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps he plans to take to improve the transparency of NHS England's clinical prioritisation process for specialised services.
The Government has laid out its plans to improve transparency in Specialised Commissioning in its recent Treasury Minute in response to the 10th Report of the Public Accounts Committee, Session 2016-17, HC397.
Details of its response can be found at the following address from page 53:
Details of considerations and decisions made by the Specialised Services Commissioning Committee are reported to NHS England and published through regular updates to the Board and NHS England‘s website. To improve clarity of its decision-making processes, NHS England has also published on its website the details of the key roles and functions of the advisory committees and decision-making bodies for specialised services.
In terms of decisions on new treatments, NHS England published Developing a method to assist investment decisions in specialised commissioning: NHS England’s response to consultation in June 2016 to support investment decisions in specialised commissioning. This describes how new clinical commissioning policy is initiated, developed, evaluated and determined. NHS England is working on similar documents which will describe the process for developing service specifications Commissioning through Evaluation and Managed Access schemes.