CCGs get £186m for IT

Clinical commissioning groups will get £186m a year to spend on GP IT.

A spokesperson for the NHS Commissioning Board confirmed to eHealth Insider that a national budget has been set based on estimated current costs of £186m.

“We are currently in the process of collecting plans from CCGs on local requirements in order to allocate the £186m out to CCGs,” the spokesperson said.

The money will need to be shared between England’s 211 proposed CCGs, which will formally take over commissioning local NHS services on 1 April.

The NHS CB announced it was devolving responsibility for funding a significant part of GP IT to CCGs in June.

However, it has not previously revealed details of how much funding will be available or how it will be allocated.

Dr Chaand Nagpaul, a negotiator for the BMA’s GP Committee, said the funding situation must be sorted out because it was undermining the ability for CCGs to choose their IT support.

“We need to get clarity on the resource per CCG otherwise CCGs will not be empowered to make their own choices about how GP IT should be deployed locally,” he said.

It is proving very difficult to get an accurate figure for GP IT resource for individual CCGs because of variances in historical spending across the country.

Dr Nagpaul believes that the result of this lack of clarity will be that the IT budget will simply move from primary care trusts to commissioning support units, which are being set up to provide IT, information and other support services to CCGs.

“The default position is for GP IT to be provided by the commissioning support units, but I think this should only be seen as a transient situation,” he said.

“The government rhetoric that CCGs will be responsible for IT will have little reality for many CCGs; it will all be run by CSUs.”

Dr Nagpaul added that it was unrealistic to expect GP IT funding to be sorted out in such a short time scale.

If IT funding was assigned on a per head of population basis this would mean a big cut in funding for some areas of the country and a sudden surplus in others.

“There’s a lot of work left to be done to try and understand the complexity of this funding arrangement,” he said.

“We need to spend the next year really trying to unravel this proposal. A lot of issues need to be debated and agreed upon in my view.”

The delegated responsibility for GP IT includes funding for hardware, networks and IT support, while funding for clinical systems will continue to be administered nationally via GP Systems of Choice.

An NHS CB document released in December said CCGs were expected to commission GP IT services from appropriate providers such as commissioning support units by the end of last year, or they may choose to deliver these services themselves.