100 strong CSO up and running in NW

NHS Cheshire, Warrington and Wirral has created a commissioning support organisation, with 100 IT staff already working for the new body.

The primary care trust cluster covers four PCTs and 1.2m patients. It has a budget of £2 billion and has eight emerging clinical commissioning groups.

Tracey Harding, NHS Cheshire’s director of ICT and the lead for the new CSO said most of the CCGs in the area had appointed an IT lead and were “very keen” to take ownership of their IT strategy.

The CSO is already working closely with the emerging groups to find out what they will want to buy in terms of commissioning support.

“They all recognise the concept of economies of scale and are all keen to use the CSO, but they might use it in different ways,” she said.

The PCT cluster already has a combined IT service. Harding said it completed an “efficiency drive” two years ago, involving voluntary redundancies, to create a streamlined service that was in a good position to become part of the CSO.

The shared IT service has 100 staff supporting about 8,000 users, with 130 customers and a total budget in excess of £10m.

All IT staff have been transferred to the CSO, which has a recently appointed a managing director.

Harding said the IT service would remain stable during the transition to the new structures first set out in the ‘Liberating the NHS’ white paper, as local CCGs felt it was crucial that existing IT services be maintained in the short term.

“But what we have been doing over the last three years is changing our service so it isn’t a standard IT offering,” she added.

The team is moving to delivering the core IT service using cloud technology, which should enable CCGs to pay for what they use. The service could also manage outsourced contracts on a client’s behalf.

“If a CCG wants to outsource their own IT, they need skills to manage that contract; but we can do that for them,” explained Harding.

Her department offers IT training broken up into “bite size chunks” so it can be completed by people in their own time.

And it offers “thought leadership” to keep people abreast of important emerging technologies and develop pilots.

“We have done a lot of work benchmarking ourselves against private providers,” she said.

“The essential difference we have is that the staff we have are totally committed to patient care – people work here because they want to make a difference in some way.”

Harding said the CSO was flexible so organisations could buy packages of the specific services they wanted.

A document on establishing the organisation from April last year, said the total cost per head for the full service would be £26.76.

Harding said this was being worked on and not every CCG would want to buy the whole package.

She added that the CSO would be hosted by the NHS Commissioning Board for “as long as it was advantageous”, but would be moving towards independence.

“Independence means more freedom to operate and that we can deliver services more economically,” she said.