Feature / Technical round-up

The Department of Health’s payment by results team has issued its eighth PBR update. This month’s issue includes information on preparation for the 2012/13 tariff, high cost drugs and devices, costing and cost collection and best practice tariffs.

NHS deputy chief executive David Flory has written to primary care clusters requesting details of their charitable estates assets. The assets would include land, buildings, equipment, investments and cash. Mr Flory asked the PCT clusters to reply by 17 February.

The NHS Litigation Authority has issued its 2012/13 risk management standards. The manual covers acute, community, mental health and learning disability and non-NHS providers. A separate manual covers clinical negligence scheme for trusts maternity standards.

The Department of Health has published the NHS standard contract for 2012/13. Previously there were four contracts but these have now been brought together into a single restructured contract. It is to be used by commissioners when commissioning NHS-funded acute, ambulance, community and mental health and learning disability services from all types of providers.

The Department of Health, Social Services and Public Safety has published a timetable for the production and certification of 2011/12 annual accounts by Northern Ireland’s health and social care bodies. A circular, which also includes some general guidance on the preparation of the accounts, acknowledged that the 2011/12 timetable is ‘very challenging’ and insisted it could only be achieved if senior managers are fully committed to the process.

The Department of Health has issued a programme budgeting benchmarking tool for 2011. The latest version of the tool contains estimates of expenditure for 2010/11. Commissioner level data for previous years is also available to download.

The 2011/12 reference cost collection guidance and NHS Costing Manual are now available on the Department of Health website. The guidance sets out mandatory requirements for reference costs collection from NHS trusts and foundation trusts.

An update on best practice tariffs is now available from the Department of Health. The update looks at new service areas being considered for best practice tariffs in 2012/13 as well as those currently in place.

The Department of Health said the revised NHS outcomes framework 2012/13 would renew the focus on results for patients. It added the service would be measured against a number of criteria, including whether treatment was successful, whether they were well looked after and whether they recovered quickly.

Approval from Northern Ireland’s Department of Finance and Personnel (DFP) at full business case stage will generally only be required for private finance initiative (PFI) schemes and not to other public-private partnerships (PPP). Guidance from the Department of Health, Social Services and Public Safety added that the DFP would reserve the right to require approval if it considered a PPP to be ‘novel, contentious, repercussive or in some other sense significant’.