Joint Commissioning in Health and Social Care: An Exploration of Definitions, Processes, Services and Outcomes

It is suggested that public sector organisations should work together more effectively to deliver the best services. In recent years this notion of partnership-working has been stressed in terms of the joint commissioning of services. Commissioning is the activity that decides of the services to be provided to local populations and who shall provide and pay for them. The concept of joint commissioning is used here to describe the ways in which health and social care agencies work together to determine this. There is little evidence which describes either the processes or provides clear messages about outcomes it produces. This project proposes an approach which builds on previous experience of evaluating public sector collaborative activities to investigate ways in which joint commissioning operates and the types of outcomes these processes produce for service users. The approach proposed incorporates a range of stakeholders, but in particular front-line staff members and service users within the case-study areas, a factor which has been lacking in previous evaluations. The project aims to produce practical knowledge about the types of joint commissioning activities taking place in England and the outcomes this produces - with the aim that these practical lessons may provide useful learning for other health and social care communities