Integrated health and care systems in England: can they help prevent disease?

Objectives: Over the past 12 months, there has been increasing policy rhetoric regarding the role of the National Health Service (NHS) in preventing disease and improving population health. In particular, the NHS Long Term Plan sees integrated care systems (ICSs) and sustainability and transformation partnerships (STPs) as routes to improving disease prevention. Here, we place current NHS England integrated care plans in their historical context and review evidence on the relationship between integrated care and prevention. We ask how the NHS Long Term Plan may help prevent disease and explore the role of the 2019 ICS and STP plans in delivering this change. Methods: We reviewed the evidence underlying the relationship between integrated care and disease prevention, and analysed 2016 STP plans for content relating to disease prevention and population health. Results: The evidence of more integrated care leading to better disease prevention is weak. Although nearly all 2016 STP plans included a prevention or population health strategy, fewer than half specified how they will work with local government public health teams, and there was incomplete coverage across plans about how they would meet NHS England prevention priorities. Plans broadly focused on individual-level approaches to disease prevention, with few describing interventions addressing social determinants of health. Conclusions: For ICSs and STPs to meaningfully prevent disease and improve population health, they need to look beyond their 2016 plans and fill the gaps in the Long Term Plan on social determinants.

Developing a User Reported Measure of Care Co-ordination.

INTRODUCTION: Older people with chronic conditions often receive poor care because of the fragmented way in which their services are delivered from multiple sources. Providers have limited tools to directly capture the views of older people about their experiences of care co-ordination. The study aim was to design and test a survey tool to capture the experiences of older people with chronic conditions regarding how well their health and (where applicable) social care was co-ordinated. METHOD: To inform the questionnaire development, we reviewed the literature on existing surveys and care co-ordination theory, and on the health status of our target audience (people aged 65 or over with one or more chronic conditions and not in hospital or residential institutions). We also consulted stakeholders including those working in health and social care services and those with expertise in the subject area. We grouped questions around experiences of care in three dimensions: care in the home environment, planned transitions in care and unplanned situations. We also designed the questions so they could be mapped onto three recognised dimensions of continuity of care - management continuity, information continuity and relational continuity - as articulated in the international literature. The questionnaire was tested using focus groups and cognitive interviews and piloted with people aged 65 and over with at least one chronic condition, using a postal survey. We used service user records in 32 general practices located in four areas and a population database held by one local authority in England as the sampling frame. RESULTS: The pilot achieved an overall response rate of 27.6% (n = 562 responses). Ninety five percent of respondents answered 30 or more of the 46 questions and three respondents answered fewer than 10 questions. Twenty four items achieved one or more positive correlations greater than 0.5 with other survey items and four instances of positive associations greater than 0.7 were found. DISCUSSION/CONCLUSION: The growing focus on care co-ordination demonstrates the need for a tool that can capture the experiences of patients accessing care across organisational and professional boundaries, to inform the improvement of care co-ordination activities from a patient perspective. Early results suggest that our tool may have a contribution to make in these areas. However, more work is required to test the efficacy of the tool on a larger scale and in different settings, and to find ways of improving response rates.

Liberalizing the health care market: the new government's ambition for the English National Health Service.

England's National Health Service (NHS) faces the prospect of a radical overhaul by the current coalition government, with the aim of improving the quality and efficiency of health services. The government has identified the increased use of competition between providers as a primary lever to achieve its goals and is creating a competitive market comprising state, private, and not-for-profit providers. This market will be overseen by an independent economic regulator with powers to intervene and shape local markets for health services. While the use of market incentives is not wholly novel, if implemented, these new reforms imply a rapid expansion of the scope and scale of competitive market forces within the NHS. This article examines the government's current proposals for increased use of competition and considers its potential impact in the light of the available evidence. It argues that despite some research evidence pointing to the potentially beneficial effects of competition on quality and efficiency, there are also risks of adverse outcomes. Consequently, there is significant uncertainty as to whether this policy will deliver the desired objectives.

How health care organizations are using data on patients' race and ethnicity to improve quality of care.

CONTEXT: Racial and ethnic disparities in the quality of health care are well documented in the U.S. health care system. Reducing these disparities requires action by health care organizations. Collecting accurate data from patients about their race and ethnicity is an essential first step for health care organizations to take such action, but these data are not systematically collected and used for quality improvement purposes in the United States. This study explores the challenges encountered by health care organizations that attempted to collect and use these data to reduce disparities. METHODS: Purposive sampling was used to identify eight health care organizations that collected race and ethnicity data to measure and reduce disparities in the quality and outcomes of health care. Staff, including senior managers and data analysts, were interviewed at each site, using a semi-structured interview format about the following themes: the challenges of collecting and collating accurate data from patients, how organizations defined a disparity and analyzed data, and the impact and uses of their findings. FINDINGS: To collect accurate self-reported data on race and ethnicity from patients, most organizations had upgraded or modified their IT systems to capture data and trained staff to collect and input these data from patients. By stratifying nationally validated indicators of quality for hospitals and ambulatory care by race and ethnicity, most organizations had then used these data to identify disparities in the quality of care. In this process, organizations were taking different approaches to defining and measuring disparities. Through these various methods, all organizations had found some disparities, and some had invested in interventions designed to address them, such as extra staff, extended hours, or services in new locations. CONCLUSION: If policymakers wish to hold health care organizations accountable for disparities in the quality of the care they deliver, common standards will be needed for organizations' data measurement, analysis, and use to guide systematic analysis and robust investment in potential solutions to reduce and eliminate disparities.

Clinicians' views of an intervention to reduce racial disparities in diabetes outcomes.

RATIONALE: Interventions that improve clinicians' awareness of racial disparities and improve their communication skills are considered promising strategies for reducing disparities in health care. We report clinicians' views of an intervention involving cultural competency training and race-stratified performance reports designed to reduce racial disparities in diabetes outcomes. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: Semistructured interviews were conducted with 12 physicians and 5 nurse practitioners who recently participated in a randomized intervention to reduce racial disparities in diabetes outcomes. Clinicians were asked open-ended questions about their attitudes towards the intervention, the causes of disparities, and potential solutions to them. RESULTS: Thematic analysis of the interviews showed that most clinicians acknowledged the presence of racial disparities in diabetes control among their patients. They described a complex set of causes, including socioeconomic factors, but perceived only some causes to be within their power to change, such as switching patients to less-expensive generic drugs. The performance reports and training were generally well received but some clinicians did not feel empowered to act on the information. All clinicians identified additional services that would help them address disparities; for example, culturally tailored nutrition advice. Some clinicians challenged the premise of the intervention, focusing instead on socioeconomic factors as the primary cause of disparities rather than on patients' race. CONCLUSIONS: The cultural competency training and performance reports were well received by many but not all of the clinicians. Clinicians reported the intervention alone had not empowered them to address the complex, root causes of racial disparities in diabetes outcomes.

Responses of Massachusetts hospitals to a state mandate to collect race, ethnicity and language data from patients: a qualitative study.

BACKGROUND: A Massachusetts regulation implemented in 2007 has required all acute care hospitals to report patients' race, ethnicity and preferred language using standardized methodology based on self-reported information from patients. This study assessed implementation of the regulation and its impact on the use of race and ethnicity data in performance monitoring and quality improvement within hospitals. METHODS: Thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with executives from a representative sample of 28 Massachusetts hospitals in 2009. RESULTS: The number of hospitals using race, ethnicity and language data internally beyond refining interpreter services increased substantially from 11 to 21 after the regulation. Thirteen of these hospitals were utilizing patient race and ethnicity data to identify disparities in quality performance measures for a variety of clinical processes and outcomes, while 16 had developed patient services and community outreach programs based on findings from these data. Commonly reported barriers to data utilization include small numbers within categories, insufficient resources, information system requirements, and lack of direction from the state. CONCLUSIONS: The responses of Massachusetts hospitals to this new state regulation indicate that requiring the collection of race, ethnicity and language data can be an effective method to promote performance monitoring and quality improvement, thereby setting the stage for federal standards and incentive programs to eliminate racial and ethnic disparities in the quality of health care.