Commissioning for Health and Well-Being: An Introduction

Extract

There were, possibly amongst others, two difficulties faced by this book. First, it had to strike a balance between a readership who may have a primary interest in health care and those whose interests might mainly be social care. This is a challenge it has successfully met. Second, as a book of separately authored papers, albeit with all the authors associated with the University of Birmingham, it was likely to be variable in style and structure. Without an editorial imposition of chapter structure, the freedom given to authors will result in variation, which means that the book is probably best read selectively rather than in totality or sequence.

There is, however, logic to how the book is organised. It starts with an overview of policy and of a history of commissioning. This provides an initial introduction to context, and indeed the book is subtitled as ‘an introduction’ to commissioning for health and well-being. But it is the middle chapters which concentrate on some of the more tricky issues such as decision making and priority setting, procurement and market management, commissioning for service resilience and for quality and outcomes that are more likely to whet the appetite for those head down and immersed in the day-to-day experience of commissioning. The final four chapters pick up on themes outside the earlier chapters’ sequence based on the commissioning cycle, and each of the latter chapters stands alone in reflecting on contemporary issues such as joint commissioning and on commissioning in an era of personalisation.