In July 2010, the Health White Paper, ‘Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS’ outlined plans to transfer NHS commissioning responsibilities from PCTs to groups of general practitioners. Until the transition to GP consortia in 2013 is complete, PCTs are pooling resources under new Cluster working arrangements, to ensure capacity and capability are maintained.

Each PCT will continue as statutory organisations in their own right. The Cluster will also support local GP consortia across Northamptonshire and Milton Keynes and enable a smooth handover of PCT functions to new commissioning arrangements.

Professor Parkes leads NHS Northamptonshire and, with a budget of £1 billion, is responsible for commissioning services to meet the needs of 700,000 residents.

John joined NHS Northamptonshire (formerly Northamptonshire Teaching Primary Care Trust) in October 2006 and, together with colleagues and partners, successfully reduced the PCT’s inherited deficit from £45m to zero. By creating a strong analytical function in a culture that expects a ‘return on investment’, John’s work over the last four years has resulted in NHS Northamptonshire being ranked as one of the most effective PCTs in the East Midlands as well as becoming a top performing national PCT.

Prior to his current role as a commissioner, John spent the majority of his career running provider organisations including 15 years within university hospitals.   In his previous role as Chief Executive of Mid Yorkshire Hospitals, John’s significant leadership was key to moving the Trust from the worst in the country to an organisation that was fit for purpose with safe and sustainable services that could deliver national and local expectations.

John is a member of the national Independent Reconfiguration Panel which provides advice to the Secretary of State on disputed or controversial service reconfigurations.

At NHS Northamptonshire we are proud of the innovative approach we have taken to encourage people to lead healthier lives. We have a series of targeted campaigns that encourage certain 'at risk' groups to change their behaviour, whether that means giving up smoking, drinking within healthy limits and/or reducing their risk of heart disease and stroke.

Some of our campaigns are hard hitting and might cause offence to some, but they have all been thoroughly tested with the groups we are trying to influence. After all, if someone is trying to persuade me to change a habit of a lifetime they need to speak to me using language that I understand and regularly use, they need to use a medium that I rate and enjoy using and the messages need to chime with my beliefs and values. Otherwise I am likely to ignore them!

Our campaigns have moved away from the 'one size fits all' type of communications to a much more targeted message directed at a certain group of people whose behaviours we want to influence. The good news is that they are proving really effective.

We have found this approach to be so successful that we have started to use it to encourage young men to visit a dentist or make the right choice when deciding what part of the NHS to use when they have a minor injury caused by too much sport/alcohol or an accident at work.

Why is this so important? Whilst lower than many other parts of the country, alcohol-related hospital admissions in Northants have increased by 102% since 2002, many of them are aurguably completely avoidable if our residents drink less alcohol on a night out. Smoking is still the greatest cause of preventable illness and premature death in England, killing around 87,000 people each year and unhealthly lifestyles across difference parts of the county continue to contribute to higher levels of stroke and cancer than we would like.

That's why our programmes can vary from giving hints and tips to those of us who know we need to cut down our alcohol consumption, to asking our young people to take a chlamydia test so that we can prevent future levels of infertility. We work with partners and carers to make sure our older generation talk to their GP sooner rather than later when they have symptoms that need to be seen urgently and offer stop smoking clinics on the doorstep for those who are ready to quit.

If you would like to learn more about how we have developed our campaigns please contact communications@northants.nhs.uk. If you would like to find out more about us have a look at our YouTube clips.  In the meantime, please find below some more information about our campaigns and remember, some of them come with an 'age appropriate' warning.

My Policy Review profile - http://www.policyreview.tv/speaker/264.html