Prescribed Specialised Services: Manual and Identification Rules Feedback

Overview

From April 2012, the NHS CB will have responsibility for directly commissioning all prescribed specialised services. ‘Prescribed’ specialised services are those services which have been ‘tested’ against the four factors in the Health and Social Care Act 2012 as suitable for commissioning by the NHS CB. The four factors are:

• The number of individuals who require the provision of the service or facility;
• The cost of providing the service of facility;
• The number of persons able to provide the service or facility; and
• The financial implications for Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) if they were required to arrange for the provision of the service or facility

The Manual

The Manual is a technical document which describes those elements of the 143 prescribed specialised services which are to be directly commissioned by the NHS CB and those elements to be commissioned by CCGs. It includes not only detail about the service to be commissioned, but also a rationale as to why that service is to be commissioned by the NHS CB and not by CCGs.

Identification Rules

The Identification Rules are the means by which specialised activity will be identified and captured by providers of prescribed specialised services. The IRs enable providers to separate specialist activity from standard inpatient and outpatient activity, and therefore which services are being commissioned by the NHS CB and which by the CCGs.

Identification Rules for Trust Information Managers

The introduction of the Identification Rules for prescribed specialised services activity will, for some provider organisations, require operational changes to enable the accurate collection and identification of data. This document has been written specifically to provide tailored support and guidance to trust Information Managers, in particular to share some of the knowledge gathered in the testing phase of the IRs and hopefully minimise any potential disruption that this reporting change may impose.

We would welcome any feedback which providers and commissioners in particular may have about the Manual and/or the Identification Rules. We will collate all feedback and use it to inform future iterations of these documents.