Biomedical subjects
Gwyn Bevan
Publications and source records attributed to Gwyn Bevan.
Have targets improved performance in the English NHS?
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Modelling the redistribution of hospital supply to achieve equity taking account of patient's behaviour.
Policies that seek to achieve geographic equity in countries with a National Health Services (NHS) require information on how to change the distribution of supply to achieve greater equity in access and utilisation. Previous methods for analysing the impact of hospital changes have relied on crude assumptions on patients' behaviour in using hospitals. The approach developed in this study is a multi-modelling one based on two mathematical programming location-allocation models to redistribute hospital supply using different objective functions and assumptions about the utilisation behaviour of patients. These models show how different policy objectives seeking equity of geographic access or utilisation produce different results and imply trade-offs in terms of reduction in total utilisation.
Effect of diverging policy across the NHS.
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Targets, inspections, and transparency.
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Should general practitioners purchase health care for their patients? The total purchasing experiment in Britain.
Until relatively recently, general practitioners (GPs) have been allowed to work independently, with no requirement to consider the resource implications of their referral and prescribing decisions. In order to align the interests of GPs with the overall objectives of health systems a number of countries have introduced primary care based capitation, funds pooling and budget holding either as experiments or as an overall policy. Are these experiments and policies likely to work? This paper presents evidence from the UK total purchasing experiment, which was the first major quasi-market development in the NHS to be independently evaluated from the outset. Total purchasing gave volunteer groups of practices freedom to purchase all hospital and community health services for their patients. The evidence suggests that whilst GPs have great potential as purchasers, they also have considerable limitations. The expectation that they will be able to improve the quality of patient experience of care, or to alter the use of resources, may not be generally realised. GP-based purchasing may be more appropriate where the task is to alter the balance or location of care between hospital and extramural settings. However, budgetary incentives are not 'magic potions' which have similar effects on behaviour wherever they are introduced. Holding budgets and having independent contracts, while important pre-requisites for being taken seriously in a quasi-market, were not sufficient for effective total purchasing. The paper concludes that health systems should not only value innovation and experimentation and encourage learning from evaluative research; they should also recognise the importance of supportive circumstances for any innovation to effect real and sustained change.
Measuring geographic inequities in the Portuguese health care system: an estimation of hospital care needs.
Portugal created a NHS to achieve greater equity of access to health care. Successive governments continued to assert the importance of equity in the face of evidence of inequities in supply of hospital resources, but lacked methods to provide sound information on the degree of inequities in Portugal and hence how to achieve greater equity. Capitation formulae have been increasingly used in other countries with a NHS to measure geographical inequities and allocate resources to reduce them. The main objective of this paper was to develop a capitation formula to measure need for hospital care for the Portuguese system by transferring this technology from methods used in other countries, and, in particular, in England. We find, however, problems with the common use of standardised mortality ratios (SMRs) as a measure of need and found age-specific mortality ratios to offer more soundly-based estimates. We also raise questions on the use of empirical estimates of utilisation of health care by age and sex as they appear to reflect inadequacies of health care in Portugal. We also believe it is important to improve knowledge of health insurance and care outside the NHS. Our results show that there are considerable inequities on the distribution of hospital resources in Portugal.
Systematic review of the use and value of computer simulation modelling in population health and health care delivery.
BACKGROUND: The objective of the review was to evaluate the extent, quality and value of computer simulation modelling in population health and health care delivery. METHODS: A narrative systematic review was carried out of world literature from 1980 to 1999, searching Medline, INSPEC, Embase, HealthSTAR, Science Citation Index, CINAHL, MathSci, INFORMS Online and SIGLE databases, and researchers in the field were contacted. Papers were included if they contained a computer simulation model of individuals in a stochastic system and the topic or setting related to population health or health service delivery. RESULTS: A total of 182 papers met the inclusion criteria. Simulation modelling has been undertaken in a wide range of health care topic areas, including hospital scheduling and organization, communicable disease, screening, costs of illness and economic evaluation. However, the quality of published papers was variable and few reported on the outcomes of implementation of models, so that the value of modelling could not be assessed. CONCLUSION: Simulation modelling is a powerful method for modelling both small and large populations to inform policy makers in the provision of health care. It has been applied to a wide variety of health care problems. Although the number of modelling papers has grown substantially over recent years, further research is required to assess the value of modelling.
Information for clinical governance: analysis of routine hospital activity data in Wales.
BACKGROUND: Variations in hospital admission rates have been extensively reported for many years, but this evidence has not had a wide impact on clinical practice. Understanding local reasons for high variation to improve quality of healthcare should be a focus of clinical governance. Our aim was to convert routine hospital activity data into information on a category of high-variation, discretionary, hospital admissions and provide a tool for analysis for clinical governors in Local Health Groups (LHG). METHODS: We undertook a cross-sectional analysis of hospital activity data for the 22 LHGs in Wales and 101 general practices in Gwent Health Authority. Hospital spells for 1998-1999 and 1999-2000 were classified into Healthcare Resource Groups (HRGs). Using the systematic component of variation we identified a category of high-variation admissions for which the only plausible explanation was medical discretion. Using scatter plots we compared the proportion of these discretionary admissions with the age-, sex- and deprivation-adjusted standardized admission ratio. (SAR) for each LHG and practice. RESULTS: We found a two-fold variation in SARs between LHGs and a three-fold variation between practices. Mean discretionary activity was 55 per cent (range 50-59 per cent) of total activity for LHGs and 56 per cent (51-62 per cent) for practices. Greatest variation was found for elective admissions. The relation between discretionary admissions and the SAR was identified for each LHG and practice as the starting point for further investigation. CONCLUSION: This method provides useful information to LHG clinical governors to contribute to the process of reducing medical practice variation, increasing equity, improving the quality of care and making more cost-effective use of resources.
The interplay between economic and political logics: path dependency in health care in England.
The purpose of this article is to use the ideas of path dependency to understand why policies implemented by governments for health care in England were and are suboptimal in terms of the control of total costs, the equitable distribution of hospital services, and efficiency in delivery. We do this by relating the economic logic of achieving these objectives to the political logic of a state-hierarchical system in which ministers are accountable for the effects of policies and doctors largely decide the supply and demand of health care. The initial policy path of the National Health Service (NHS) controlled costs but lacked systems to achieve equity and efficiency in the funding of hospitals. Policies were introduced to achieve equity, but not efficiency, in the 1970s. The Thatcher government sought efficiency through a budgetary squeeze in the 1980s, which culminated in the NHS funding crisis of 1987 - 1988. The result was the policies of the NHS internal market, which promised efficiency by introducing a purchaser-provider split and a system of provider competition in which money would follow the patient. These promises justified an injection of extra funds for three years, but only a pallid model of the internal market was implemented. The Blair government abandoned the rhetoric of competition but maintained the purchaser-provider split and continued to constrain total NHS costs, which resulted in the funding crisis of 1998 - 1999. Current policies are to substantially increase spending on health care and reintroduce a system of provider competition in which money will follow the patient.