Issue - meetings

To hear from Sarah Price, Accountable Officer, Haringey Clinical Commissioning Group.

Sarah Price, Accountable Officer, Haringey Clinical Commissioning Group presented the following points:

• She will be working closely with Dr Helen Pelendrides (Chair of the Haringey Clinical Commissioning Group) through the authorisation process.

• At present the Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) has a delegated responsibility and can therefore make decisions. 

• The CCG won’t be fully accountable until April 2013.

• There is lost of change coming for the CCG over the next 6 months to prepare them for full authorisation.

• This is a time of risk, however it has been planned for which includes planning to mitigate risks.

• The CCG is financially challenged, with a significant overspend.

• The CCG is changing the way that services are provided, moving towards a more integrated approach and one which wraps around families.

• Working closely with other boroughs and organisations to improve services and value for money.  There are potentially lots of alliances which the Haringey CCG can benefit from.

In response to questions from the Panel the following points were made:

• Referral management and demand management are two key challenges.

• Budgets are not controlled by the Clusters, they are centrally controlled.

• The Cluster has been able to financially risk share by pooling a top-slice of budgets.  for example the 2% top slice has been used to transform services.

• Haringey has previously paid less into this top-slice due to it’s financial pressures.

• The CCG are looking at ‘risk pool’ options across London.  This would enable CCG’s to access any surplus which they wouldn’t have otherwise been able to.

• It is not necessarily better to have an under-spend rather than an overspend as each area starts from zero every year.

• The CCG is unable to pool budgets with the Council until April 2013 as they are not a statutory body until then.

• The direction of travel in Haringey is towards greater integration.

• Discussion between the CCG and senior Managers in Adult Services is taking place.

• The NCL Primary Care Strategy aims to improve services across the board.  However there is a need to develop a Haringey Primary Care Strategy from the NCL one.

• Haringey has a different GP profile to the rest of the NCL cluster in that it has a high number of salaried GPs.

• The CCG is hoping to appoint a Medical Director and a Director of Quality soon.

• Allocation of Public Health funding does not directly link to the previous spend of an area on Public Health.  Allocations are currently being revised and so figures may change over the next couple of months.

Sarah was welcomed to her new role in Haringey by the Panel and thanked for attending so early in the role.

The Panel wished for their thanks to be passed on to Andrew Williams, outgoing Borough Director/Acting Accountable Officer for his help and support during his time in Haringey.

Action

Senior Policy Officer to look into what disease areas are likely to cause the highest budget pressures.