Introduction

To improve patient outcomes in an increasingly challenging financial climate, the NHS is developing new ways of delivering care. Some of these initiatives require cross-organisational working, blurring traditional distinctions between primary, secondary, physical health, mental health and social care.

To be effective, improvement efforts require access to robust and timely information on the differences that changes are making to the quality of the care provided to patients. Unfortunately, local teams often lack access to the analytical skills and data they need to judge whether improvements are being made. To help meet this need, the Health Foundation is partnering with NHS England to establish the Improvement Analytics Unit. The new unit is working with local teams in England that are participating in national transformation programmes, and feeding back information on progress against key metrics related to the quality and efficiency of health care.

The ambition is to establish the Improvement Analytics Unit as a resource within the NHS. It began with two initial pilots to test the technical feasibility of the approach to linking data and selecting control groups. This briefing is the first output and considers the impact of providing enhanced support to people living in care homes in the NHS Rushcliffe Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) area. Since it was not possible to randomise individuals to alternative interventions, comparisons were made against retrospectively matched control groups. The analysis was conducted jointly by the Health Foundation and NHS England. This briefing is authored by the Health Foundation and considers the findings of the analysis.

While the analysis provides useful information regarding the effect of enhanced support for care home residents in Rushcliffe, ultimately the greatest value will come from combining the quantitative evidence from the Improvement Analytics Unit with other evidence, such as from qualitative evaluation, to guide the progress of new models of care or other projects as they evolve. Thus, in the longer term, initiatives like the Improvement Analytics Unit might form one part of a wider approach to ‘rapid-cycle evaluation’, in which qualitative and quantitative information is combined with quality improvement skills to enable ‘course correction’ in a more timely manner than has been possible before now.

Previous Next