Dental Tribune United Kingdom Edition

About the author Amanda Atkin runs Atkinspire Ltd and offers practic- es support, train- ing and consultan- cy on information governance, CQC compliance, Na- tional Minimum Standards and HTM 01-05. Her bespoke service sup- ports practices as they embed the required standards within their daily routines – to ensure a high quality service and patient safety at all times. e amanda@atkinspire.co.uk www.atkinspire.co.uk for Government Update pub- lished earlier this year, against the commitment to introduce a new dentistry contract the ‘What we have done’ comment was: We have established the pilot programme to test out ele- ments of a new dental contract, and published initial findings in the autumn of 2012. We will continue to work closely with the NHS Commissioning Board to develop a new dental con- tract. Meanwhile, a new health and care system in England will be in place from April of this year and Clinical Commis- sioning Groups (CCGs) will re- place PCTs. CCGs will commis- sion many of the services for their local community such as services provided by GPs, A&E, maternity services and so on. However, a new independent body, set up on 1 October 2012, called the NHS Commissioning Board (NHSCB) will commis- sion all dental services (includ- ing primary, community and secondary care hospital dental services) and urgent and emer- gency dental care. The NHSCB will also commission a wide range of other health and care services such as primary oph- thalmic services and pharmacy services. This is so-called Di- rect Commissioning. The NHSCB takes up its full statutory duties from 1 April 2013 and terms itself a ‘special health authority’. It comprises a number of directorates, with Barry Cockcroft, Chief Dental Officer, a member of the Medi- cal Directorate. In addition, it has regional and area teams. The NHSCB will draw upon the knowledge and expertise of local professional networks (LPNs) to secure local dental services. LPNs should be mul- ti-disciplinary and include a lo- cal eye health network, a local pharmacy and, of most interest to us, a local dental network. Local dental networks will have a wide ranging role – sup- porting practices, developing integrated care pathways, en- suring high quality standards are maintained and so on. At the time of writing, NHSCB area teams are drawing up plans and budgets on the basis of them commissioning all dental services. However, the NHSCB document Support- ing planning for 2013/14 for Direct Commissioning, dated 24 January, states (paragraph 7): ‘Discussions are continuing as to whether secondary den- tal care is better commissioned from a centre of expertise, this has not been finalised’. For primary care the NHSCB cur- rently has a number of priori- ties including the ‘safe’, ‘steady state’ transfer of dental (and other) PCT contracts to the NHSCB on 1 April 2013. Following the anticipated publication of Securing excel- lence in commissioning NHS dental services in February 2013, the NHSCB will begin to develop national care path- ways across all dental special- ties in line with the outcomes of the new national NHS dental contract pilots. It will continue to support the dental contract piloting programme and plans to implement a new dental contract by 2014-2015 or even 2016! The work PCTs are cur- rently undertaking is pre- dominantly to ensure that all independent contractors, including dentists, have a contract in place which is cur- rent, has all the relevant pa- perwork attached and is up- loaded electronically onto the NHS secure server. It is advis- able for dentists with an NHS contract to ensure such pa- perwork is in place, it is cur- rent, signed and dated, that the statements you receive from the NHS DS include the cor- rect contract value, the cor- rect amount of activity, your UDA value is what it should be and any outstanding variations to contracts such as partner- ships etc. are in place as PCTs start to novate contracts to the NHSCB. DT 23Practice ManagementMarch 25-31, 2013United Kingdom Edition