The deadline of June 20 to submit ideas on how area teams and clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) can ‘co-commission’ GP practices is looming and CCGs in various parts of the country are busy developing plans for how they can take more control of primary care.

Last month NHS England’s Chief Executive Simon Stevens invited CCGs to express interest if they wanted to commission primary care in their areas and help to keep it sustainable.

However, his idea has come under fire from the British Medical Association (BMA), which has said that having a role in primary care commissioning would result in conflicts of interests for CCGs and would ultimately mean that GPs in CCGs would have to performance-manage their own contracts.

Meanwhile, the General Practitioners’ Committee (GPC) has already criticised plans to pool GP contract funding, saying that there are ‘inherent risks’ involved in that for practices.

Despite these concerns, some CCG leaders have taken to the proposal enthusiastically and are apparently even looking at splitting the national GP contract and taking control of all Quality Outcome Frameworks (QOFs) and directed enhanced service (DES) funding, although others have decided that they will not apply to co-commission primary care, as it would ‘risk the relationship’ with member practices.

Some CCGs, such as NHS West Hampshire, are putting forward radical proposals, such as suggesting the pooling of all non-core contractual funding, which they say is a much more creative way of using the money rather than being forced to do things that conform with national requirements.

Other CCGs that have so far shown interest in co-commissioning include NHS Bristol CCG, NHS South Warwickshire CCG, NHS Northern, Eastern and Western Devon CCG and NHS Norfolk CCG.