Dear colleague,

Thank you to all who joined our all-staff briefing earlier today, where I gave an update on our current work. As promised, I also set out where the changes to NHS England itself have got to, and this note summarises the state of play..
 
As you know, Ros Roughton and Karen Wheeler, together with the national and regional directors, have been working on the next phase of our organisational development.
 
The first phase was to get our national directorate structure right. This is now largely complete, with Karen Wheeler heading our Transformation and Corporate Operations directorate, and Ian Dodge our Commissioning Strategy directorate. We have also created a national specialised commissioning taskforce, and expect to appoint to the substantive director role in September/October.  
 
The second phase has been to better focus and align the work of NHS England on our core priorities. Workshops have been held with many staff across the organisation to identify better ways of working. Our Board has also identified several provider-led or regulatory functions that might in future better be undertaken by other national NHS partners, such as oversight of individual practitioner medical revalidation, some aspects of our work on patient safety, and sponsorship of some provider-focused IT programmes. In the meantime we will continue to ensure these three areas have our full support so we can continue to deliver this really important work well. We have also identified core commissioning skills where we are going to be strengthening our capabilities. These include specialised commissioning, the design and implementation of new local care models, support for new CCG and local government integrated commissioning models, payment reform and incentive design, and operational research. Wherever possible we will redeploy expertise internally to beef up these functions.   
 
We are now entering the third phase, playing our part in helping with the financial pressures on frontline NHS services. This means we are being required by government to further cut our running costs. By April 2015 we need to make savings of around £80 million – or 15% - of our running costs across NHS England. This will be a difficult time, but we are not alone in this as CCGs and other NHS arms-length bodies are going through the same process. All savings are being transferred to frontline patient care budget allocations for 2015/16. National Directors have identified how they would do this across the National Support Centre and will be discussing their plans with their staff over the coming weeks. We have an outline plan for the field force in Commissioning Operations. We propose a much more integrated model across regions and areas outside of London so we avoid duplication and work more effectively across all parts of the organisation. This will obviously mean some change, especially to leadership arrangements, with Area Directors likely to oversee a larger geography, working more closely as part of the regional team, with each Area Director also taking on a national lead role for a specific topic. We will be working with teams over summer to develop the detail on the changes proposed in the national support centre, regions and areas and we will then begin conversations in mid-September with any colleagues who may be affected. 
 
Your commitment to the organisation and hard work continues to be crucially important as we move into Autumn and a very challenging time. We will do everything we possibly can to minimise the disruption to you and minimise redundancies. As well as communicating with you regularly about these changes, we will be ensuring the right support is in place for staff who may be affected by some of the proposed changes. 
 
Meantime, thank you again for joining today’s briefing – and more importantly for everything you are doing.
 
Best wishes
 
Simon