What do you think about a single clinical commissioning group for Kent and Medway?
The NHS in Kent and Medway is seeking your views on how health services are commissioned (planned and purchased).
The NHS, social care and public health organisations in Kent and Medway are already working together.
Their aim is to improve services and health and care outcomes through better joint working, shared priorities and more coordination between health and social care. To do this, they need to change the way they organise themselves.
Building on the feedback from that survey, they’d now like to find out your views about one of the key changes - the proposal to create a single clinical commissioning group (CCG) for Kent and Medway.
Although they and the other CCGs have much to be proud of over the last six years, the GPs who chair the CCGs, including the clinical chair, now believe the CCGs should merge to form a new single clinical commissioning group for Kent and Medway, which would also be led by GPs.
At the moment, there are 8 CCGs across Kent and Medway, responsible for planning and spending the health budget to meet local needs. This means there can sometimes be different services in different areas. This can be a good thing if people in areas need different things, but it can also create inequality in care and impact on people’s health and life expectancy.
Merging the existing groups to set up a single Kent and Medway CCG, led by GPs, would:
• Provide a ‘bird’s eye view’ of health priorities for people across Kent and Medway so that the NHS has a detailed understanding of local health needs and can plan effectively for everyone.
• Identify where challenging health problems can be shared and tackled.
• Allow the consistent commissioning of some services - such as cancer, mental health, children’s services and prevention - across Kent and Medway.
• Focus on the health, wellbeing and care needs of the whole population.
• Reduce management and administration costs across Kent and Medway.
You can read more about how health and care services are planning to work more closely together as part of a Kent and Medway integrated care system on the system transformation page of the Kent and Medway website.
The NHS wants to hear what you think about their plans to merge these 8 groups into one clinical commissioning group for Kent and Medway.
The survey is open until Monday 23rd September 2019. Please share it with your friends, colleagues and family as your views are important.
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