The actuarial basis for financial risk in practice-based commissioning and implications to managing budgets

Consumer health organisations for chronic conditions: why do some people access them and others don’t?

BACKGROUND

Consumer health organisations (CHOs), which operate outside the mainstream healthcare system with a specific focus on supporting people to self-manage their health conditions, have become widespread. Yet, there has been little systematic research into CHOs, including their perceived benefits and barriers, which encourage or deter their access by people with a variety of chronic health conditions.

AIM

This study explored the benefits of CHOs in self-management and also the barriers that inhibit their access, from the perspective of people with chronic conditions and their unpaid carers.

METHODS

In-depth, semi-structured interviews were completed with 97 participants across four regions of Australia. The sample included a high representation of people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as well as non-indigenous Australians.

FINDINGS

Three inter-related themes were identified that represented the benefits of involvement and participation in CHOs: knowledge and information, connection and support and experiential learning. However, limited access pathways emerged as a barrier that inhibited a person’s entry into CHOs. Furthermore, the person’s beliefs and experiences about their own health condition(s) also inhibited their continued participation in CHO programmes.

CONCLUSION

Although our findings confirm that CHOs are a valuable resource in alleviating the ‘work of being a patient’ for some people, there seems to be some barriers that prevent their full access and utilisation.Structured integration systems to increase the reliable delivery and accessibility of CHOs are needed to ensure that people who would benefit from accessing them can do so.

General practitioner commissioning consortia and budgetary risk: Evidence from the modelling of ‘fair share’ practice budgets for mental health

Objectives:

To contribute to current policy debates regarding the devolution of commissioning responsibilities to locally-based consortia of general practices in England by assessing the potential magnitude and significance of budgetary risk for commissioning units of different sizes.

Methods:

Predictive distributions of practice-level mental health care resource needs (used by the Department of Health to set ‘fair-share’ practice budgets) are aggregated to a range of hypothetical, but spatially-contiguous, consortia serving populations of up to 400,000 patients. The resulting joint distributions describe the extent to which the legitimate mental health needs of consortia populations are likely to vary. Budgetary risk is calculated as the likelihood that a consortia's resource needs will, in any given year, exceed its allocation (taken as the mean of its predictive distribution) by more than 1%, 3%, 5% or 10%. The relationship between population size and budgetary risk is then explored.

Results:

If between 500 and 600 consortia are created in England (serving 87,000 to 104,000 patients) then, in order to meet the legitimate mental health needs of their patients, each year around 15 to 26 consortia will overspend by at least 5%, and one or two by at least 10%. The budgetary risk faced by consortia serving smaller/larger populations can be read off the graphs provided.

Conclusions:

Unless steps are taken to mitigate budgetary risk, the devolution of decision-making and introduction of fixed budgets is likely to result in significant financial instability. It will be difficult to reconcile the policy objectives of devolved commissioning, best met through relatively small and fully accountable consortia, with the need for financial stability, which is best met by pooling risk across larger populations.

Setting health care capitations through diagnosis-based risk adjustment: a suitable model for the English NHS?

The English system of health resource allocation has been described as the apotheosis of the area-level approach to setting health care capitations. However, recent policy developments have changed the scale at which commissioning decisions are made (and budgets allocated) with important implications for resource allocation. Doubts concerning the legitimacy of applying area-based formulae used to distribute resources between Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) to the much smaller scale required by Practice Based Commissioning (PBC) led the English Department of Health (DH) to introduce a new approach to setting health care budgets. To this end, practice-level allocations for acute services are now calculated using a diagnosis-based capitation model of the kind used in the United States and several other systems of competitive social health insurance. The new Coalition Government has proposed that these budgets are directly allocated to GP 'consortia', the new commissioning bodies in the NHS. This paper questions whether this is an appropriate development for a health system in which the major objective of resource allocation is to promote equal opportunity of access for equal needs. The chief reservation raised is that of circularity and the perpetuation of resource bias, the concern being that an existing social, demographic and geographical bias in the use of health care resources will be reinforced through the use of historic utilisation data. Demonstrating that there are legitimate reasons to suspect that this will be the case, the paper poses the question whether health systems internationally should more openly address the key limitations of empirical methods that select risk adjusters on the basis of existing patterns of health service utilisation.