CHE Seminar Series: Reconciling the individual- and population-level effects of community nursing on hospital activity
Shifting care from hospitals into community settings is a longstanding, international policy goal. In England, this is one of the ‘three strategic shifts’ on which the forthcoming ten-year plan for the NHS will be based. Such policy ambitions assume that increasing healthcare provision in community settings is lower cost and can reduce the demands placed on hospitals. However, evidence to support this is lacking.
I will discuss ongoing research commissioned by the NHS seeking to summarise this relationship between community health services provision and hospital use. We use new national data on workforce and service use in community and hospital settings. These data show that community health services account for 20% of the total NHS workforce and deliver 100 million patient contacts annually.
Our results show that timely access to community nursing teams following hospital discharge is associated with lower subsequent hospital use at the individual level. However, we also find no relationships between community healthcare provision and any type of hospital use at the population level.
We are now exploring what is creating this apparent contradiction at the individual and local system level. Possible reasons include omitted variable bias in one or both analyses, lagged impacts, complementarities as well as substitution effects between services, and released hospital capacity being used by other patients. In the seminar I will set out how we plan to investigate these competing explanations empirically, with a view to deriving clear and simple policy recommendations.
Speaker profile
Rachel Meacock is a Reader in Health Economics at The University of Manchester in the UK. Her research focuses on the organisation and financing of healthcare. Rachel is also the joint head of the UK Health Economics Association, HESG.
Weekly seminar series
As part of our Centre's vibrant research culture, we host a weekly seminar series. Visiting and invited researchers present current research relating to the economics of health and wellbeing, and the healthcare sector. Visitors are welcome to join these sessions where discussion and debate is encouraged.
For further information on our seminar series, please contact Trong-Anh.Trinh@monash.edu.
Event Details
- Date:
- 2 December 2024 at 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
- Venue:
- Caulfield campus, Building H, level 9, room H9.14
- Categories:
- CHE Seminar; General
Description
Shifting care from hospitals into community settings is a longstanding, international policy goal. In England, this is one of the ‘three strategic shifts’ on which the forthcoming ten-year plan for the NHS will be based. Such policy ambitions assume that increasing healthcare provision in community settings is lower cost and can reduce the demands placed on hospitals. However, evidence to support this is lacking.
I will discuss ongoing research commissioned by the NHS seeking to summarise this relationship between community health services provision and hospital use. We use new national data on workforce and service use in community and hospital settings. These data show that community health services account for 20% of the total NHS workforce and deliver 100 million patient contacts annually.
Our results show that timely access to community nursing teams following hospital discharge is associated with lower subsequent hospital use at the individual level. However, we also find no relationships between community healthcare provision and any type of hospital use at the population level.
We are now exploring what is creating this apparent contradiction at the individual and local system level. Possible reasons include omitted variable bias in one or both analyses, lagged impacts, complementarities as well as substitution effects between services, and released hospital capacity being used by other patients. In the seminar I will set out how we plan to investigate these competing explanations empirically, with a view to deriving clear and simple policy recommendations.
Speaker profile
Rachel Meacock is a Reader in Health Economics at The University of Manchester in the UK. Her research focuses on the organisation and financing of healthcare. Rachel is also the joint head of the UK Health Economics Association, HESG.
Weekly seminar series
As part of our Centre's vibrant research culture, we host a weekly seminar series. Visiting and invited researchers present current research relating to the economics of health and wellbeing, and the healthcare sector. Visitors are welcome to join these sessions where discussion and debate is encouraged.
For further information on our seminar series, please contact Trong-Anh.Trinh@monash.edu.