Commissioning – a climate of targets and consultant observers

It’s Friday – thank goodness and the prospect of a weekend break looms. I feel a little like radio man Chris Evan, who perpetually enthuses about Fridays.

In truth, there’s little to get excited about, but just stopping will be good.

Before I finally escape my work duties, I must blog . . . an essential ingredient of my week.

There was a piece in the Guardian that caught my eye earlier this wee. It was written by a commissioner with a local authority and gives a kind of fly-on-the-wall insight to current practices.

I quote his work: “It’s 10.00am and I’m in to my third meeting of the day. We are discussing performance measures for commissioners; it’s telling that nearly all of them involve savings targets and decommissioning rates. Today’s climate has changed significantly from when I started ten years ago.”

He then adds: “Now the people chairing are likely to be from the finance department and the note takers from a firm of consultants. But the question is always the same from both, not how do we make it better, but how do we make it cheaper?”

Does this sound all too familiar?

The most telling quote is this one: “No matter how many ingenious ways of redesigning care and reducing costs you come up with, however, it’s never enough. The demand for more savings is a constant one. So where do you go when the traditional routes are exhausted?”

The commissioner tells the readers that the new buzzword is coproduction, “the elixir to solve all ills.”

What’s it mean? Giving people at the sharp end of need the power to create their own resolve.

Care is surprisingly the black hole for the number crunchers in councils – a dread and something to ‘be dealt with’. But this decants into people’s lives. I hear you say. Yes it does.

Another quote from the piece says: “The challenge for commissioners and their managers has been not only to let go of the purse strings, but also explore what is out there in terms of alternative and less traditional funding options. It has meant being more creative, freeing up funding from elsewhere and hunting it down in the most unlikely of places.”

There is an air of desperation that emerges in theses words, though I’m sure they were not written to convey it. Necessity is the mother of invention, they say, but what happens when, as the article points out, the single cake is all cut up and after all, there’s just one to slice?

I wouldn’t want a commission’s job for a king’s ransom – it’s cripplingly difficult work and finding the balance between need and finance is never going to be easy.