What are the challenges for commissioning in a brave new world? Evolving relationships between public health specialists and clinical commissioners

The Nuffield Trust and the Catalyst Network hosted a partnership seminar exploring how public health specialists and clinical commissioners can work effectively together.

As the commissioning landscape develops, the Government’s policy statement on public health: Healthy lives, healthy people: update and way forward, highlighted the role of public health specialists in offering their expertise, advice and analysis to clinical commissioning groups and health and wellbeing boards, as well as to the emerging NHS Commissioning Board.

This engagement requires both public health specialists and clinical commissioners to review their relationships with each other to identify how they can best utilise each other’s expertise.

We welcomed Dr Chris Packham, Clinical Champion for Public Health, RCGP Centre for Commissioning and Dr John Middleton, Vice President of the Faculty of Public Health and Director of Public Health, Sandwell Primary Care Trust.

This seminar brought together early career clinicians, managers and public health specialists to:

• Discuss how clinical commissioners can best utilise the expertise, experience and knowledge of public health specialists in commissioning;

• Identify how public health specialists can support clinical commissioners to work effectively with local authorities;

• Explore concerns raised around the fragmenting of responsibility for commissioning pathways of care.

The event was chaired by Dr Geraint Lewis, Senior Fellow, Nuffield Trust and Dr Douglas Noble, Director, Catalyst Network.

This was our second partnership seminar, and details of the previous event which focused on partnership working following the White Paper can be found on the dedicated event page.

You can also access further information about our work on commissioning via the area of work page which pulls together all of our commissioning resources, or by visiting the project page: Supporting the development of clinical commissioning groups.