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Lord Warner today spelled out how commissioning can help primary care trusts both to achieve better local services for patients and to squeeze every penny of value out of each pound spent by taxpayers on the NHS.

He said: 

'The local NHS is the custodian of taxpayers' money.  With that role comes responsibility. At the core of the commissioning role is challenging how the NHS spends its money and ensuring that the best outcomes for patients are achieved. It means ensuring local patterns of service delivery are right for today and tomorrow and not stuck in the rigidities of the past.

'The White Paper Our Health, Our Care, Our Say set out our vision for a much more integrated set of health and care services, delivered much closer to patients homes. This vision will need to be brought to life by commissioners and the decisions they take to commit NHS resources. The message is clear clinically - more day surgery, more alternatives to specialist referrals in hospital. Across the NHS we need commissioners to make sure best practice clinically is used everywhere and that the unprecedented extra money available to the NHS is used more productively.

'Finance shouldn't be used as an excuse for not tackling this agenda. Better integration between health and social care, more active management of patients in the community and better preventative services are not just better ways of delivering to patients, they can also be more cost effective as well.

'If we get it right, joint commissioning and other ways of collaboration have the potential to deliver not only real benefits for local people with timely, integrated services, but also genuine efficiencies in service provision through effective preventative interventions and greater self care. Helping an older person to live independently by putting a £25 grab rail into their home can prevent a fall and so avoid an expensive emergency hospital admission.

'But commissioning is a shared responsibility. Strong relationships with GPs and local authorities will enable primary care trusts to commission the right services for their patients in the right places and provide seamless links between those services.'

Lord Warner also outlined how commissioning would develop in the coming months. He said:

'We know that we have further work to do on commissioning as our reform programme for the NHS takes root. We will publish an integrated framework for commissioning in the summer, including practice based commissioning, tying together the different elements of the reforms.

'As patients make wider and wider choices, we will need contracts that support this, without drowning the NHS in bureaucracy. We also need to work through the role we want commissioners to play and over the next few months the Department will be seeking the views of people across the NHS and local government.'

Lord Warner also announced that a 'fitness for purpose' tool is being developed for PCTs, to strengthen their ability to commission.

He said: 

'PCTs need practical help and new skills to help them become truly effective commissioners which deliver real improvements for local residents. For example, we will help primary care trusts to identify gaps in local commissioning, help them to produce development plans, and provide support for practice-based commissioning through the National Primary Care Development Team. We are also developing a range of national contract templates and examples of best practice, based firmly on evidence.'