At the recent NHS Confederation conference in Liverpool, Simon Stevens, CEO of NHS England said new local models for care delivery could see GPs, hospitals and social services form new joint provider groups. But Mr Stevens is not proposing another round of wholesale reform of the NHS. Instead he emphasises that this proposals are very much horses for courses.
In a wide ranging speech one of the questions Mr Stevens asked was And what if in a few parts of the country rather than perpetuate the increasingly arbitrary boundary between GP and community-based care on the one hand and hospital-based outpatient diagnostic and even some inpatient care on the other - these health professionals and perhaps even social services wanted to form new multispecialty provider groups. Perhaps taking delegated multiyear budgets to manage defined populations while committing to use the dividend from more efficient team working to put the local NHS on a sustainable financial trajectory.
The full text of Mr Stevens's speech can be found here: http://www.england.nhs.uk/2014/06/04/simon-stevens-speech-confed/