If you work in primary care, place-based partnerships, or local authority health integration, you may have spotted a new acronym emerging from NHS planning documents: OPIC, or the Office of Pan-ICB Commissioning.
Each of the seven NHS regions is establishing an OPIC to take on commissioning responsibilities previously held by NHS England. These bodies are set to handle services that genuinely need regional coordination, specialised services in particular. The timeline sees OPICs becoming operational through 2025/26, with full transfer of commissioning responsibilities by April 2027.
For those of us with longer memories, this may feel familiar. The model echoes the old Strategic Health Authorities abolished in 2013, which managed specialised commissioning through centralised regional teams. What goes around comes around.
So what does this mean for neighbourhood health partnerships?
The good news: OPIC sits at the opposite end of the commissioning spectrum from your work. The strategic commissioning framework is clear that neighbourhood coordination and place-based service planning remain closer to home. OPIC handles the aggregation; you handle the integration.
But here is where it gets interesting for multi-neighbourhood providers and emerging Integrated Health Organisations. OPIC-commissioned services do not operate in isolation. Specialised pathways have community elements. Specialised services interface with urgent care, mental health crisis response, and frailty teams. Your neighbourhood health plans will need to articulate how you connect with regionally-commissioned services to create genuinely seamless pathways for local people.
This creates a new integration challenge. Multi-neighbourhood partnerships already navigate relationships with multiple local authorities, each with their own public health priorities, social care arrangements, and VCFS ecosystems. Now you must add OPIC into the mix as another commissioning layer requiring engagement. The partnerships that thrive will be those that can demonstrate how their neighbourhood-level work connects upwards to regional pathways and sideways across local authority boundaries, all while keeping the focus on improving wellbeing for local people.
For local commissioners, this has practical implications too. As OPIC takes responsibility for area-wide services, place-based commissioners will need clarity on where their remit ends and regional commissioning begins. Getting this boundary wrong risks either duplication or gaps. Getting it right means better value and better outcomes.
The challenge: while regional attention focuses on establishing these new structures alongside ICB mergers and 50% running cost reductions, there is a real risk that place and neighbourhood levels get squeezed. Pioneer sites and emerging neighbourhood health teams need to maintain momentum despite the organisational turbulence above them.
At Scale can help you navigate these changes, build the relationships that matter across commissioning boundaries, and ensure your neighbourhood health plans remain on track while the landscape reshapes itself around you.
