What are Specialised Services?
Specialised services are those with low patient numbers but which need a critical mass of patients to make treatment centres cost effective. This means that the catchment or planning population needed to commission the service will be over one million. This means there will be relatively few centres offering treatment and there will not be a specialist centre in every local hospital. Sometimes 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.
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. Specialised services are subject to different commissioning arrangements than other NHS services.
The Specialised Services National Definitions Set lists those services which are specialised. The second edition of the Definition Set, covering 35 services, was published in December 2002. It is currently under review.
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