A document setting out the next steps for NHS England’s Five Year Forward View reveals that officials plan to identify areas to pilot new ways of working early in 2015.
Areas will be chosen to trial the ‘multispecialty community provider’ model, primary and secondary care integration, new forms of small local hospitals and ‘models of enhanced support in care homes’.
Practices will also be able to bid for a share of £250m premises funding during 2015/16 – the first tranche of a four-year £1bn investment in primary care infrastructure.
Prototypes for NHS
NHS England’s The Forward View into action report says it will work closely with pilot areas, and that they will be chosen not just to improve local care, but on the basis that they can be ‘a prototype that can be adapted elsewhere, designed from the outset to be replicated by subsequent cohorts’.
To bid to become one of the first transformation pilots, areas must have an ‘ambitious vision’ of how they will change care models, and how this will meet an identified local need.
They will also have made ‘tangible progress’ towards new working models during 2014, and have already begun investing locally in changing ways of working.
Investment will be delivered to the first cohorts within 2015/16, with ‘support programmes’ developed by the end of March, the report says.
