Health and Social Care Bill

I will talk in a moment about specialised commissioning and I hope the answer to the noble Lord’s question will emerge. Amendment 84, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Patel, would require the board to commission highly specialised services, in collaboration with the sub-national clinical senates that are accountable to it. I will not rehash my arguments around Amendments 51 and 224A, but many of the same points will apply to this amendment. Specialised services are challenging to commission; they involve complex care pathways, small numbers of providers and very small numbers of patients with rare conditions. The new NHS Commissioning Board authority will be considering options as to how it does this, including the best form for its substructures. There will be the freedom to adapt these over time and, to ensure that progress is not lost, the board will be required under existing provisions to maintain the necessary focus of clinical expertise in these highly specialised areas. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, asked how we ensure that clinical senates are not ignored; this is precisely why we do not want to prescribe their role in the Bill. We want senates to be enabling bodies, which is why we are inviting views on the type of advice they could provide to identify the functions of the board and CCGs where they would add value. The noble Lord, Lord Patel, indicated that he thought the clinicians on the senate would have to come from outside the clinical commissioning group area. That is not the case; he is not correct in that assumption. There may be slight confusion with the rules we set for secondary care doctors on CCG governing bodies, who must avoid conflicts of interest, hence the need for area restrictions in that context. Experts on clinical senates can come from, in theory, all or any areas of the country. The difference between the senates and regional specialist commissioning is that the latter focuses on specialised services and nothing else. The senates could, in theory, work across all services; the two are not designed to do the same thing. The senates will be quite high level. It is expected they will be about only 15 in number, and while they may be established in a certain form they can evolve over the years to conform to the requirements that are placed upon them. My noble friend Lady Jolly pressed me on the role of the board with regard to specialised commissioning, and I have already indicated in outline part of that role. The key point is that the board will maintain the necessary focus of clinical expertise and it will be under specific duties to obtain professional advice in the exercise of its functions. Under the regulations, the types of service the board will be required to commission will be kept under regular review. Work is going on at the moment to define what those services should be in the first instance, and I fully expect them to conform broadly to the specialised services national definition set. As my noble friend knows, the list of those services has historically changed over time and I expect the same will apply in the future. The noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, asked about the long promised organigram. In fact, our fact sheet on the overall health and care system does have an organigram in it. It includes the NHS Commissioning Board and describes how senates and networks will be hosted by the board. I refer the noble Baroness to that sheet. The noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, asked how senates will be different to academic health science centres in their focus. In short, AHSCs are partnerships of local academic and health bodies to support innovation and excellence in that area. However, they will not be impartial; they are by definition a vested interest. Therefore, they would not be the right bodies to offer the broader perspective on how services should best be configured across a region. I hope that noble Lords will be at least somewhat enlightened by the details I have been able to give about clinical networks and senates. As I say, this is work in progress. I make no apology for that. This was very much a recommendation that emerged from the Future Forum report. We have got on with the work needed to flesh out what these bodies should be, but we have a broad and, I hope, helpful idea of their role across the wider NHS system. I hope the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw his amendment.