In a recent article which appeared in the Guardian Professional, HSMC's Jon Glasby believes too little is being done to turn commissioning into a career of choice for future public service leaders: "If you are a young, bright, aspirational 18-year-old, what is there out there to make commissioning attractive?"
If you work in local government, you may be there because of your expertise in social care, housing or planning. What you might not have expected when you went for your job interview is that you'd be commissioning services in what seems like a constantly evolving landscape of public service delivery.
From personalisation to the abolition of PCTs, recent years have seen a series of major changes to the way public services are commissioned and delivered. Changing structures combined with reduced budgets have created new challenges for commissioners involved in improving and redesigning services – and involved many others in commissioning for the first time.
Faced with such difficult challenges, health and social care commissioners need support to be effective - and the infrastructure to do this has often lagged behind the policy context. At HSMC, we have tried to respond to this agenda through our clinical and strategic commissioning work programme and through a new edited introduction to strategic commissioning.
Read the full article in the Guardian Professional, 28 June 2012