NHS England recently announced that it is “looking very actively” at how it can make Clinical Commissioning Groups get involved in commissioning primary care.

From September 2014, NHS England will hand over a role in commissioning primary care to Clinical Commissioning Groups. This handover is related to setting up a new system of integrated primary and community health and social care – just like the new system that the Calderdale and Greater Huddersfield Strategic Outline Case plans to set up.

It doesn’t seem to bother NHS England that this would create a clear conflict of interest for Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), which are groups of local GPs; or that the GPs’ trade union, the British Medical Association, had just a week earlier said it opposed CCGs commissioning or decommissioning GP contracts because of conflict of interest. Continue reading →