Strength in numbers
Released 26/04/2011
Who should sit on a commissioning board
It's becoming increasingly clear that for practice managers to get a say in commissioning, they will have to ask for it. Not everywhere - Cambridgeshire, for example, where I went to interview practice manager Sam Clark at East Barnwell Health Centre, is lucky to be one of many places to fully support managers taking a position on its commissioning boards.
However, there are other places where GPs hear GP-led commissioning and forget the ‘p' in GP can mean ‘practice' just as much as ‘practitioner'. It will be in these places that practice managers will need the support of local networking groups, or national ones, such as the Practice Management Network, to get their voices heard now more than ever.
A good consortium should have at least one practice manager on its board, and many of the successful pathfinders already do. Now is not the time to be coy, PMs, it's the time to speak out and offer your skills up - that is if you want to get involved. Many will see the extra work required of commissioning practice managers as too much when you take into account everything else they still will need to do - not to mention CQC.
The responsibility CQC requires of its accountable officers - who will no doubt mostly be practice managers - should be enough for a promotion to partner at the very least! Practice teams will, no doubt, have to grow to support the busy lives of future primary care professionals, but in times of austerity, this can seem a luxury few can afford.
The other group that should not be neglected from consortia boards are the patients. Again, smart pathfinders are inviting leaders of their patient participation groups to sit on their boards, though this can be easier said than done - it's hard enough to meet the recent DES that calls for an even demographic of patient participants. If anyone is going to rally the patients, it's surely going to be the practice managers.
Now is the time to champion the practice management cause and get involved with your consortia while they're still malleable. One way many PMs are doing this is by sustaining a very close working relationship with the PCT, to speak manager to manager about what could be needed in the future under a reformed NHS.