Commissioning: barking up the wrong tree?

Commissioning: barking up the wrong tree? In 2008, at the 60th anniversary of the NHS, Kenneth Clarke, the health secretary who introduced the purchaser/provider split into the NHS in 1991 observed: ‘if one day subsequent generations find you cannot make commissioning work, then we have been barking up the wrong tree for the last 20 years’.
Well, we are not quite there yet. But it is clear that faith in the ‘purchaser/provider split’ or in ‘commissioning’– and its accompanying concepts ‘choice and competition’ – as the key drivers of reform is fast dissolving. The King's Fund.