Thursday, September 1, 2011

NHS Reform: Fragmentation & Dis-integration

There is much “intertwining” in the natural world: can we learn from it?

Brittle Sea Star©2010 Am Ang Zhang

It is not difficult over the New Year period for anyone in the NHS to see how the internal market has continued to fragment our health service.

Look at major hospitals in England: Urgent Care Centres are set up and staffed by nurse practitioner, emergency nurse practitioners and GPs so that the charge by the Hospital Trusts (soon to be Foundation Trusts)  for some people who tried to attend A & E could be avoided. It is often a time wasting exercise and many patients still need to be referred to the “real” A & E thus wasting much valuable time for the critically ill patients and provided fodder for the tabloid press. And payment still had to be made. Currently it is around £77.00 a go. But wait for this, over the New Year some of these Centres would employ off duty A & E Juniors to work there to save some money that Trusts could have charged.




Urgent Care Centres are one of the most contentious parts of the NHS reforms. Both the College and the King’s Fund have consistently questioned the evidence base and the clinical and cost effectiveness for this major policy change2 3. Surprisingly many of the NHS pathway groups still recommend such units. The public will be very confused by the desire of some Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) to re-name the ED as an “Urgent Care Centre” for ambulatory patients.

The perceived problem that PCTs are trying to solve
There is a perception that many patients attending the ED should be treated in primary care. The College’s view is that a relatively small number are clearly non-urgent primary care problems that should have been seen by their general practitioner. A larger group of patients with urgent problems could be seen by primary care if there was timely access to the patient’s GP or out-of-hours services - e.g. at weekends. The College believes that improving access to GPs is the best way of dealing with this issue. At most we think that 25% of ED patients might be treated by general practitioners in an ED setting. There is no evidence to support the contention that 50-60% of ED attendances can be treated in Urgent Care Centres.

The approach of setting up an urgent care centre in front of every ED is an example of demand management. This has already been shown to be unsafe when tried in the USA.



Intertwined?

This is certainly not how Kaiser Permanente would run things: all integrated and no such thing as “cross charging”. In fact the doctors are not on a fee-for-service basis but like Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic and Johns Hopkins Hospital, doctors are paid a salary.

I quoted Prof Waxman in an earlier post:

The internal market’s billing system is not only costly and bureaucratic, the theory that underpins it is absurd. Why should a bill for the treatment of a patient go out to Oldham or Oxford, when it is not Oldham or Oxford that pays the bill — there is only one person that picks up the tab: the taxpayer, you and me.

And there are big problems with the billing process. For example, if a patient is seen in an outpatient clinic then there is a charge made by the hospital for his or her first attendance — but follow-up appointments are not charged. And if many treatments are given in a hospital to a patient, only the most expensive of the treatment episodes is charged.

There are savings to be made. It is alleged that there are just 75,000 administrators at work in the NHS but this figure is laughably mythological.

One report by the Centre for Policy Studies published in 2003 indicated that there were 250,000 administrative staff employed in the NHS: at least one administrator for every nurse.

……..Moving patients from one place to another does not save the nation’s money, though it might save a local hospital some dosh. So the internal market has failed because it does not consider the health of the nation as a whole, merely the finances of a single hospital department, a local hospital or GP practice.

So as lead Consultants face the managers in meetings after the New Year festivities about the White Paper and Foundation Trust status and how we need to copy Kaiser Permantente, there is no need to talk about the 24 % “illest” that Kaiser did not treat, instead raise the points about a truly integrated NHS, in Kaiser Permanente fashion.

Just do away with our internal market and let GPs and Consultants go back to the good old days of working together without worries about  PCT/Commissioner’s approval of the referral.

Integration not fragmentation!

Prof Waxman:

…….Instead let them help the NHS do what it does best — treat patients, and do so efficiently and economically without the crucifying expense and ridiculous parody of competition.


"Whatever the benefits of the purchaser/provider split, it has led to an increase in transaction costs, notably management and administration costs. Research commissioned by the DH but not published by it estimated these to be as high as 14% of total NHS costs. We are dismayed that the Department has not provided us with clear and consistent data on transaction costs; the suspicion must remain that the DH does not want the full story to be revealed. We were appalled that four of the most senior civil servants in the Department of Health were unable to give us accurate figures for staffing levels and costs dedicated to commissioning and billing in PCTs and provider NHS trusts. We recommend that this deficiency be addressed immediately. The Department must agree definitions of staff, such as management and administrative overheads, and stick to them so that comparisons can be made over time."

                                                                                                     House of Commons

                                                                 







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