NHS clinical commissioning groups drop odd names, adopt boring ones

The NHS Commissioning Board last week published a new list of clinical commissioning groups (CCGs), which will take over from primary care trusts in April 2013 in running primary care in England. As I was remapping the list for Guardian Healthcare Network (the map is also below), three things were striking about the new list: it’s shorter (212 ’emerging’ CCGs as opposed to 268 before); there are now far fewer very small CCGs; and the rich profusion of odd names in previous lists has been stamped out.

Map removed as Google Fusion Tables no longer works.

Red markers show CCGs covering populations of more than 300,000, yellow 250,000-300,000, green 200,000-250,000, blue 150,000-200,000, purple fewer than 150,000. From Guardian Healthcare Network.

The old list of clinical commissioning groups included some names of practice chains that were changing into CCGs, such as the Red House Group in Hertfordshire and WyvernHealth.com in Somerset; some that sounded like brands in the making, like EsyDoc in Redhill and KLEAR Healthcare Consortium in London; some that sounded rather evocative, like Baywide (Torbay), Sentinel (Plymouth) and Golden Valley (Surrey, although isn’t that the name of a brand of eggs?); and some that were just mystifying, such as Salveo in Kent and Cavella in Basingstoke.

These have all vanished. In the new list, emerging clinical commissioning groups are called NHS [area] CCG – the only difference between primary care trust names and these being the addition of the three letters CCG at the end.

In fact, there’s really only two that stand out. Cornwall’s group is called NHS Kernow CCG – Kernow being, of course, Cornish for Cornwall. But, perhaps overwhelmed by losing the name Cavella, the CCG covering 22 GP practices in Basingstoke and north Hampshire is currently going under the name CCG Name to be agreed. Which does add a little bit of variety.

For more health mapping, see UK male life expectancy mapped, from Glasgow to Kensington and Stroke care in the south west: how do hospitals compare?