The current English NHS reforms: what can be learned from NZ?

The current English NHS reforms: what can be learned from NZ?

The New Zealand-United Kingdom Link Foundation in association with the The School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
and The Nuffield Trust, London

Request the pleasure of your company at a seminar on Wednesday 22nd October 2014

in the Jerry Morris Lecture Room, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

Featuring the NZ-UK Link Foundation Visiting Professor:

Professor Robin Gauld, Professor of Health Policy, Otago University, New Zealand
Chair: Professor Nicholas Mays, Professor of Health Policy, London School of Hygiene and Tropical MedicineFormal Respondent: Dr Judith Smith, Director of Policy Nuffield Trust

The UK Health and Social Care Act 2012 has enacted a radical reform of the funding of health and social care in the UK. Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) have been replaced by Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs). These are groups of General Practitioners (GPs) who will undertake all purchasing for NHS care on behalf of their patients.

Thus, where PCTs were appointed governance bodies that coordinated and purchased care from GPs and hospitals, purchasing has now been shifted to GP groups. This is placing emphasis on primary care while setting up something of a competitive process amongst service providers for securing funding contracts with CCGs. Most CCGs have limited experience in purchasing services. There are few examples elsewhere of such arrangements in tax-funded ‘national’ health systems to draw lessons from. This lecture, therefore, will discuss the case of New Zealand’s ‘Independent Practitioner Associations’ (IPAs), GP-led groups in place since the early-1990s that provide management services and negotiate funding contracts on behalf of GPs. IPAs have been involved in numerous innovations aimed at improving primary care services and are GP-led. Yet they were never mandated by government policy. The lecture will look at the lessons from IPAs for CCGs, with a particular focus on the role of self-determination (the NZ case) vis-à-vis regulation (the UK NHS case). The lecture will also discuss New Zealand's new 'alliance' governance arrangements which bring together clinical leaders from across the local health system to work collaboratively on patient-centred care system design.