Technical review - July 2018

NHS Improvement has published a proposed timetable for the costing mandation project. Using the 2016/17 reference cost submissions, the oversight body has identified each trust’s main service and when it expects it will be required to submit patient-level costs for acute, community or mental health services. Designated acute trusts have been mandated to submit patient-level costs from 2018/19. Subject to mandation approval, if a trust’s main service is mental health but it also provides community and acute services, its proposed first year for mental health costs will be 2019/20. Its acute services would also be submitted in 2019/20, with community to follow in 2020/21. It is proposed that a community health trust that also has some acute and mental health services would submit patient-level costs for all three services in 2020/21. Submissions for ambulance trusts would go ahead from 2019/20, according to the timetable.

The expanded agency staff data collection will begin on 25 July, NHS Improvement has announced (see Sustained pressure) The revised collection comes in the wake of changes to sign-off thresholds and steps to reduce agency costs for administrative staff. The first of the expanded weekly submissions will report data for the week commencing 16 July.

The Department of Health and Social Care must consider the impact of extending the right to personal health budgets on finance departments, according to the HFMA. Responding to the Department consultation on extending personal budgets beyond those in receipt of NHS continuing healthcare, the association’s response said it broadly supports the proposals. However, it said the support staff requirements in clinical commissioning groups must be considered. Finance staff in mental health providers knew little about personal health budgets, and expansion plans must include these NHS organisations, the HFMA added.

The HFMA has updated its briefing on the application of the international financial reporting standard IFRS16 – Leases. The leasing standard applies to NHS bodies from 2019/20 and will remove the distinction between operating and finance leases. The updated briefing reflects the recent Treasury exposure draft on the application of IFRS16 in the public sector and adds a second worked example. It warns application of IFRS16 will be time consuming and shows practical steps that can be taken now, as well as issues to be considered when applying the standard for the first time.

NHS Improvement has added a new imaging compartment to the Model Hospital. The tool is accessible by NHS staff and is organised in five lenses: board-level oversight; clinical service lines; operational; people; and patient services. Within each lens, there are a growing number of domain-specific compartments enabling users to drill down into wide-ranging performance metrics. In total there are now more than 1,500 metrics published within the Model Hospital based on 2016/17 data collection.

The HFMA has published an overview of treasury and cash management in the NHS. The briefing, trailed in the June issue of Healthcare Finance, looks at these areas across the NHS, examining treasury management in detail together with best practice in reporting treasury and cash management issues. It also considers the management of working capital and how NHS bodies can improve their cash flow.