What are Specialised Services?
Specialised services are those with low patient numbers but which need a critical mass of patients to make treatment centres clinically and cost effective, usually catering for rare diseases and other complex conditions. This means that the catchment or planning population needed to commission the service will be over one million. Consequently, there will be relatively few centres offering treatment and there will not be a specialist centre in every local hospital. At present one specialist service centre may cover the population of several Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) or a whole Strategic Health Authority (SHA). It may be bigger than this and there may be only one or two centres across the country. Specialist treatment managed from a small number of treatment centres is, however, compatible with local delivery of care for many conditions, much of the time.
Challenges for these services include training specialist staff, supporting high quality research programmes and making the best use of scarce resources like expertise, high tech equipment and donated organs.
The Specialised Services National Definitions Set lists those services which are specialised. A third edition of the Definitions Set, covering 34 services, was published in phases over 2009/10. Four definitions from the previous set were dropped and three new definitions were added.
A Specialist Provider's view
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