The Secretary of State publishes annually a document known as the NHS mandate which specifies the objectives which the Board should seek to achieve.

In 2018 it was announced that the organisation, while maintaining its statutory independence, would be merged with NHS Improvement, and seven "single integrated regional teams" would be jointly established.

Sir David Nicholson, who became Chief Executive at the establishment of the Board, retired at the end of March 2014 and was replaced by Simon Stevens.

[9] NHS England produced a planning document – the Five Year Forward View – in October 2014 which envisaged development of new models to suit local needs.

[11] In April 2017 it introduced a capped expenditure process, applied to NHS commissioners and providers in the 13 areas across England with the largest budget deficits.

[17] In view of the coronavirus pandemic, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care directed the NHS Commissioning Board to buy services from the private sector, thereby bypassing CCGs.

[23] In April 2016 it published an index of digital maturity, where each of the 239 NHS trusts assessed its own "readiness", "capabilities" and "enabling infrastructure".

"[27] In 2020 the NHS awarded an emergency contract to Palantir Technologies for the creation of a Covid Data Store system for a statutory fee of £1.

[29] An FDP would enable every hospital trust and integrated care system (ICS) to have their own platform through which they could connect and share information between them where helpful.

[33] Specialised services are those provided in relatively few hospitals and accessed by comparatively small numbers of patients, but with catchment populations of usually more than one million.

The Shelford Group expressed concerns in May 2022 about services "where the numbers and evidence base supports the planning and provision of care being done at a population size larger than a typical ICS footprint.

"[35] It authorises and pays for treatment of narcolepsy with sodium oxybate by means of individual funding requests on the basis of exceptional circumstances.

The judge criticised their "thoroughly bad decision" and "absurd" policy discriminating against the girl when hundreds of other NHS patients already receive the drug.