Final Report > Chapter 29: The Care of Children > A framework for the future of children's healthcare services > How to improve the commissioning of children's healthcare services so that it is based on children's needs rather than on providers' convenience

How to improve the commissioning of children's healthcare services so that it is based on children's needs rather than on providers' convenience

29 The new NSF must state that arrangements should be put in place to ensure that children's healthcare services are commissioned locally in an integrated way. Attention should be drawn to examples of good practice. What this means is both deceptively obvious yet radical. It contemplates that, in planning healthcare services for children, the starting point is the needs of children in that particular locality, rather than, and this is the important point, what those providing a variety of services have hitherto been in the habit of providing. The services are planned around the children, rather than the children taking whatever is on offer and not receiving what is not on offer. The work of the East London and City Health Authority, which has set up a system of locality-based commissioning for children's services, is a good example of integrated commissioning.