Healthcare Commissioning Forum

PCTs have a statutory duty to keep their spending within the limit set by the Department of Health. Each PCT needs to decide how they are going to spend the limited resources available to them and achieve the best value for money.

The NHS Atlas of Variation in Healthcare (Ref.2) was published in November 2010 to help remove unwarranted variation to increase value and improve quality. Clinicians and managers are expected to review the maps contained in the Atlas and to identify variations and, where necessary, take action to address them. The Atlas refers to low clinical value treatments and highlights two issues:

• Some patients are receiving treatments that some clinicians would consider unnecessary and of no added value.
• There is an opportunity cost to providing low clinical value treatments. PCTs could spend the money better: for example on other types of treatment, either for the people with the same condition or to meet unmet needs in another group of patients.

For further information : http://www.audit-commission.gov.uk/SiteCollectionDocuments/Downloads/20110414reducingexpenditure.pdf