Cautious welcome for plans to replace practice based commissioning with budget holding

Government plans to give GPs more power to manage budgets “hold promise” and could mean better patient care and value for money, but they would have to be “implemented carefully” to deliver real benefits to patients, suggests a report from the University of Birmingham’s Health Services Management Centre.

The new government is touting GP budget holding as the successor to practice based commissioning, arguing that it will be more successful as GPs will be offered “hard budgets” to manage themselves.

The report looks at the US model of capitation—the payment of a fixed amount of …