Local people should decide who can take on the new NHS contracts, according to NHS England’s National Medical Director Dr Claire Fuller.
Speaking at the NHS Confederation’s Integrated Care System Conference in London last week, she assured delegates that the new neighbourhood and integrated health organisations (IHO) contracts would be out ‘soon’.
And in answering a Pulse PCN question on who NHS England would like to see take on the IHO, single and multi neighbourhood provider contracts, Dr Fuller said it should be decided by 'local people' and that it is likely to be served by an 'alliance' of providers.
’It [should be] the best people locally to take them on, and that should be decided by local people,' she said.
‘In some cases, that may be a hospital trust that is integrated, which maybe in the right person. In some places, it maybe you've got a brilliant GP Federation that should be doing it.
‘In some places, it should be an alliance contract across those two. I'm not going to sit here and go, “it's always going to be that”,' she said, adding ‘you can't have one organisation leading any of these bits on their own’.
Dr Fuller said that it would not be possible to have an IHO contract without involving GPs.
‘You can't do an IHO if you haven't got relationships with your GPs, with your community trust, or your local authority, it isn't a binary thing. Increasingly, I think it will be that these new contracts, will be Alliance contracts,' she said.
‘I can't see how anybody would end up being an IHO if we didn't have a mechanism making sure the general practice leadership across that patch was also used here.'
The new contracts were launched in Fit for the Future 10 year health plan for England.
According to the plan, the single neighbourhood provider (SNP) contract will deliver enhanced services for groups with similar needs over a single neighbourhood of around 50,000 people with GPs encouraged to lead these neighbourhood providers as an alternative to working in general practice.
A second multi neighbourhood provider (MNP) contract will cover 250,000 or more people for care that requires a scaled-up approach across several different neighbourhoods in areas such as end-of-life care.
Multi neighbourhood providers are to work with GP practices and smaller neighbourhood providers in their footprint to create new commercial opportunities including clinical trials and they can also support or take over struggling GP practices.
They will cover functions already being provided in some areas by GP Federations, such as shared back-office functions, overseeing digital transformation and estate strategy, and will provide data analytics and quality improvement.