Commissioners in Norfolk are to vote on plans to set up a joint committee that would “ideally” broker “single contracts” for all five local clinical commissioning groups with all their major providers.
The news comes as local CCG chief officer Antek Lejk has been appointed executive lead of the Norfolk and Waveney sustainability and transformation partnership.
Mr Lejk, who will remain joint chief officer of North Norfolk and South Norfolk CCGs, took over the STP role after Norfolk County Council managing director Wendy Thomson stood down earlier this month. She said it was “the right time” for an NHS manager to lead the project.
Mr Lejk told HSJ that proposals for a “joint executive committee [in charge of] developing single contracts with our main providers” would be voted on by all five CCGs at their September board meetings.
He said: “We don’t want to do things five times when we could only do once. If you have three acute trusts and five CCGs all developing slightly different relationships, it’s [like a] spider’s web and it gets messy.
“We want to encourage better joint working across the acute trusts so eventually we can say ‘these are the outcomes we want to achieve… let’s not have 15 conversations, let’s just have one’. Our ideal would be to have a single conversation with our acute colleagues which is a one to one relationship.”
Full story in the HSJ, 22 August 2017