Welcome to the new Durham Dales GP-Led Commissioning website.
We have changed the name of our website in anticipation of the changes that are about to take place in the NHS.
In 2012 the Strategic Health Authority in the North East will disappear and our Primary Care Trusts will disappear by April 2013. At that point, GPs will have a statutory duty to commission services on behalf of their patients.
The advantages of this new system are as follows:
- GPs will become directly accountable for the financial consequences of their referrals and prescribing
- Budgets for healthcare will be moved closer to patients. Patients will have a greater say in the services that are commissioned by their GPs on their behalf. We should have much less bureaucracy than we have now.
- GPs should be able to provide a greater range of local services based in the community.
- GPs will be able to work more closely with our colleagues in hospitals, the Local Authority, Social Services and the voluntary sector.
This is an exciting change in the NHS. It allows clinicians to take more control over the commissioning of services and managerial staff will be aligned to those GP commissioning consortia.
GPs will be able to commission services based on the feedback they get from their patients. The focus in future will very much be on the registered population of a practice and the people that live in Weardale and Teesdale.