Priority setting

As the purchaser of health services for the British population, the NHS has always had to make hard choices about who is eligible for treatment, what services to cover and what criteria patients need to meet before treatment is administered.

In recent months in particular, there have been extensive debates about who bears responsibility for making these decisions and the basis on which they should be made.

These include questions about how the duties of the Secretary of State for Health should be framed, the extent to which the NHS Commissioning Board should...

Last year the Archbishop of Canterbury attacked what he described as "the quiet resurgence of the seductive language of the deserving and undeserving poor".

The pressure to make huge savings within the NHS, coupled with the commissioning agenda and the introduction of private competition to that process could see the deserving and undeserving poor joined by the deserving and undeserving sick. This can't be right. After all, no one chooses to be sick.

When I hear insulting terms like "frequent flyers" being used to describe people who are sick and need...

I was struck by the general appetite for a more open debate about rationing and priority setting at a recent conference on priority setting in health held by the University of Birmingham’s Health Services Management Centre (HSMC) and the Nuffield Trust.

The conference focused on the experiences of primary care trusts (PCTs) in making difficult choices. During the morning session HSMC’s Dr Suzanne Robinson introduced findings from research published by the Nuffield Trust that explored current priority-setting...

The 'Nicholson' challenge necessitates the making of difficult decisions by NHS commissioners. Most of the clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) that will emerge in 2013 look set to be smaller than the primary care trusts (PCTs) they are replacing, and with significantly less management support whilst – crucially – bearing similar legal liabilities.

However, when it comes to setting and accounting for funding priorities, the...

An interesting thing occurred when Andrew Lansley announced that NICE would no longer recommend which drugs and treatments should and should not be offered on the NHS – NICE became, well nice.

The alternative, new local commissioners having to make these decisions at a local level looked inequitable and unworkable.  After all, NICE has been a lightening conductor for public anxiety around rationing, and has taken difficult and highly technical decisions out of the hands of local commissioners.

Following a recommendation from the...