Patient Involvement
Contracting
Contracting refers to the part of the commissioning process that relates to definition of the agreement between the Commissioner, who is purchasing the services and the Provider of the same services.
One of the most obvious opportunities for public involvement in the contracting process is in the service specification. What kind of inputs matter most to the local population and what kind of outputs are most meaningful to service users?
Asthma UK has developed a set of patient oriented inputs by fragmenting the elements of good clinical practice and using surveys of people with asthma to rank these. While they identified patient oriented outcomes by consulting focus groups about the treatment outcomes identified in international guidelines.
Discussions with local user groups or the recruitment of user representatives into the contracting process may be time consuming but if time and care is spent building the capacity of these groups they can provide both accountability and insight.
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