The first interview is with Keith Grint, Emeritus Professor at Warwick University on the lessons from his work on leading Critical, Tame and Wicked Problems. We discuss the interplay between command and control and adaptive leadership, the role of soft power, and how to ensure you are the best decision-maker you can be.
Three conversations this week showed how easy it is to get seduced into doing the wrong thing. All of these showed that if primary care focuses its change effort on fad or ill informed policy it will just make things worse. We have to take an evidence based view.
These were the conversations:
You have seen this slide before – where we show that young people aged 7-24 are not accessing GP appointments.
What Helen told me was shocking. She said that across West Yorkshire 30% of the out of hours demand was for young people aged 16 and under.
Earlier in the week I’d been contacted by a network of PCNs who had decided to tackle the issue primary care for young people – which is really great. They were going to go to schools and tell them about social prescribing and the services they were offering. The data above tells us that walking into a GP practice is not what young people want or need. I suggested two things to the PCN Network to think about:
When you read my blogs on people who attend frequently in Primary Care you will see that there are 3 main issues:
My vlog (at the bottom of this blog) on working with general practice and their communities, shows that when you ask communities they say that to live a good and healthy life firstly people need shelter, stable finances, family and friends, meaningful lives and work etc. But the Marmot Review 10 years on shows us how these basic needs are not being met and are undermining people’s health:
General Practice is experiencing an increase in demand directly related to people’s social conditions. No amount of social prescribing and extended hours will solve this problem – it needs to be solved at source. I don’t know how many appointments are for poverty-created health needs, but we need to find out. As I said at the RCGP conference – primary care has to understand need so it can push back against policies that are sticking plasters not problem solvers. Once we know this we can work with local government, our political representatives and the public to help people. I would argue GPs have a professional duty to do so.
Another key issue here is the disproportionate impact for the minority ethnic population , and that leads me to the last conversation
I was at a meeting of the Advisory Group for the RSA’s Future of Health and Care work. One area that is generating a lot of attention is genome sequencing and the ability to predict people’s health almost from birth. However a few weeks ago I’d chaired a cancer conference for Inspire2Live (a brilliant organisation that brings the best of science, clinical knowledge and citizen leadership together) rather cleverly called “Evidence, Arrogance, Ignorance, Eminence’ – which rather sums up the NHS dilemma. These presentations got to the heart of the issues:
No amount of genome sequencing is going to help if (a) our data for determining solutions does note reflect the ethnic mix of our population and (b) we don’t address the critical issues of living healthy lives …. we are back to Marmot. The future of health and care is in living well not treating disease accelerated by poor social norms (poverty, investment in education…).
After the push back on the draft DES what should PCNs be doing themselves to secure better quality primary care, reduce demand and improve population health?
I’ve written plenty of blogs on PC so this one is an update on key issues where you can make a difference without centrally prescribed solutions.
Purpose
Whilst there are endless contributions about PCNs having to find their own purpose and NHSE not prescribing a sole purpose, the draft DES demonstrated the disconnect between what PCN CDs thought PCNs were for and how to deliver that, and NHSE’s approach.
To find out what PCNs think they are for I set up a survey which you can fill in here sharing your Purpose with colleague PCNs (and where you can see theirs) which will give you access to the emerging picture of how PCNs describe their raison d’etre and what they are focusing on.
The survey shows the following direction in terms of purpose:
“To develop integrated working and sharing across practices to provide resilience and allow for innovation and excellent community based care for patients.”
“Strengthened practices, empowered community, support of the vulnerable”
“Joined up working to address issues one at a time across the PCN to improve care”
The responses so far focus on working collaboratively to:
On the whole these mirror my proposal in terms of domains of work with reference to other health systems internationally:
Any purpose must be described in a way that you would know if you’d achieved it – these PCN ones signal direction but they are not quite there yet in terms of specificity along the lines of some famous ones (e.g. RNLI – a charity that saves lives at sea).
Without purpose PCNs will, like the rest of the system, be reactive rather than proactive. And it’s being reactive that has generated the crisis in PC.
So NHSE should be heartened from those that have participated so far, that the direction of travel they describe will secure quality primary care. But the next year is crucial – the same PCNs have been wise in where they are focusing their efforts, getting member practices on board, collaborating on complex needs, securing a workforce to meet needs. Disrupting the formation of these collaborative networks will mean these PCNs will not achieve their purpose (that and unsophisticated metrics for monitoring see below on averages). And this was the push back on the Draft DES – PCNs need space to understand the problems they face and build the relationships to collaborate.
Step one is to get a clear purpose and determine your focus for the coming year. Then direct your development money at achieving that. Assuming yours will be along the lines of those above here are some updates:
Meeting Complex Needs – Acuity
I’ve talked before about ‘know your list’ – if you know the patterns of people using your services (and other services e.g.A&E) you can start to be proactive in meeting needs. This means you have to differentiate your list. In the blogs on Frequent Attenders here and here we identified that people who turn up frequently are not all the same sort of people. We share how you might differentiate the ‘type’ of FA. Our proposition is that in all practices there are varying degrees of ‘acuity’. Here is an example of the range of complexity for the whole system and how to differentiate within a practice
One Surgery devised a project to improve how they triage, care for, and provide continuity to patients who attend their surgery the most (>30 attendances in last year), using an Emis code within our Care Plan template to trigger a “Patient Access Contract”. Over a 12 week period for 25 people with the Access Contract, the data shows a reduction in all appointments of 43% (67 less appointments for 25 patients), a reduction in the number of clinicians involved by 45%, and a reduction in OOH contacts by 56%, suggesting that improved continuity can reduce demand on appointments and improve care. This is the first iteration of their innovation in reducing the number of people who attend frequently. They are going on to explore even better ways of identifying and proactively securing continuity.
The only health warning on this is the regression to the mean – we know that a % of people who attend frequently do just stop attending frequently in the subsequent year, so this is a great start and its good to look even deeper for the patterns over time.
Care Homes
There was a fair degree of uproar at the care home requirement in the draft spec. However the direction of travel was supported. You can find an overview of ‘what works in care homes’ here and I’ve popped a googledrive with evidence summaries here (if you have more do send and I’ll add). It triggered the sharing of multiple examples of dedicated teams of nurses, ward rounds, paramedic hot lines, GP alignment, and concerns that the DES would disband the best practice that has emerged.
People who live in Care Homes have increasingly complex needs and need continuity. Staff working in Care Homes are in the lowest 10% of the pay scale, are often on zero hours contracts, and there is a high turnover of staff (Roy Lilley, Gimme Strength 15th January 2020). It’s tough working in care homes, and even tougher if you are trying to navigate the different requirements and care plans of practices where the residents are registered. We know aligning care homes to practices improves the quality of care for people who live there – and they spend less time in hospital. As above in the section on acuity – having continuity makes a real difference as does valuing and supporting people who care for these folk. So given this is known, why isn’t primary care doing this everywhere? My experience is that many Practices have found ways of working with their CCG and Local Council to solve the problem. But there are examples where this is not happening – often a mix of a lack of imagination about funding and Practices being intransigent. It doesn’t require a DES, it requires learning from those who have worked it out, and for a collaborative approach to funding. Proactive management improves people’s lives, reduces overall costs and reduces demands on general practice overall, but it does need the CCGs to find ways to fund it. My sense is that PCNs can solve this one without a DES – and should.
Here are a couple of amazing examples:
“For several years we have a LES for GP care home rounds and one care home per Practice. It works, our practice does weekly rounds and we have the lowest rate of unplanned admissions for dementia patients in the county.”
“We have GP weekly ward round. GPs are supported by community nurse practitioners from community services. We were one of the care home vanguards. Secondary care geriatricians support weekly MDT. We have case management and pharmacist support. We have developed fantastic relationships with care home staff we support & help each other. It reduces overall demand for GPs.”
Social Prescribing
To help people struggling with life you need to recognise their assets, and make the most of the assets in your community to generate a network of local people (volunteers) who can help each other, lead by practice/patient/community champions who will nurture and value and grow the volunteers. See this blog.
Social prescribers can help that happen if they have skills in community building, and they should have. Without that SPs will be inundated with the need for appointments with people who need ‘connecting’ – and they will never meet the need. As we are seeing, SPs are finding that their appointments are filled quickly. Sucking up what should be the role of community building into the NHS won’t work. You can see more in my blog on this here.
SP came out of fantastic examples of success. These had at their essence, community building; face to face appointments for people who need help navigating the system; support to be able to make personal choices; help with their coping strategies; and leadership of this combined system. Those transactional models that are emerging will increase demand and will not reduce workload. Just a reminder from my SP blog
Metrics that relate to the transactional model (number of appointments) mirrors the problems in general practice. We provided a set of metrics for SP based on models that have worked and have demonstrable impact in terms of people living well and reducing their demand on the NHS. This is what we found in The Asset Based Health Inquiry. How best to develop social prescribing? (page 17)
“We suggest metrics along these lines that get to the heart of the intent of a primary care model of social prescribing:
Reducing Unwarranted Variation – Understanding Primary Care
Underneath all of this is a fundamental difficulty in understanding Primary Care. This blog isn’t long enough to go into the details – I’ll ask Nick Downham to help us out here – but one thing is for sure, getting all practices to the ‘average’ of them all is not securing quality nor will it solve the problems in PC.
I had a rather odd experience recently where a practice was below average on out patient referrals one year and above (a bit) in the next year and the CCG wanted to know what the problem was. The average had gone up because all the PCN practices had improved!!! It wasn’t a problem, the average had changed. Somehow getting to average will solve A&E admits, referrals etc. etc? Of course it doesn’t. There needs to be a fundamental change in understanding at CCG level about what they are commissioning for (it seems to be reduced A&E admits rather than people living healthy lives, and there is a belief that will reduce secondary care costs), how the metrics they use relate to what they are commissioning for (A&E admits are not just about PC nor are all A&E Admits bad, AND you need to understand what sort of A&E admits you need to reduce and by how much – i.e. what’s good practice and what’s possible). Another GP practice challenged this narrative to find that the A&E admits their CCG wanted to reduce wasn’t anything to do with their practice.
So another blog to follow on how you reduce unwarranted variation in primary care but the starting place has to be:
At the heart of all of this is data. PCNs are getting a range of support to meet needs, but they need help understanding population need, understanding variation and acuity, differentiating their list, understanding if what they are doing is making a difference. As yet there is no additional provision for data support to understand all these key factors. If there is one thing that will help PCNs get off the ground its data.
Thanks to Ben Gowland for being a great interviewer. Here is my view on PCNs, purpose, direction, where to start and what to say ‘no’ too.
You can visit Ben’s site here
The Asset-Based Health Inquiry launches this week, investigating how best to develop social prescribing. You may have read previous blogs here on how best to collaborate with communities – ‘Them and Us” about the power of citizen leadership; ‘Primary Care and Scale – who should we be collaborating with?’ setting out the need to build out from communities not artificially mandate a scale for working with populations that doesn’t recognise existing community identities.
The report intends to shed light on the amazing work that is already happening. Perhaps the best advice we can give is this:
You can read the report here. The report has four inspiring case studies – The Alvanley Way (Alvanley Family Practice) The Frome Connections (Frome Medical Centre and Health Connections Mendip) Grenfell: After the Fire (you may have seen the fantastic Fatima Elguenuni at NHS TEDx) Wakefield: Dancing Down the Corridors (Creative Minds, West Yorkshire Partnerships Trust).
We go through a number of dilemmas and myths on purpose, scale, money, metrics, method and language; and the key to developing a sustainable model. For those of you interested in the evidence there is a full literature report too in Section 2.
Here are three things you need to know from the report
1. Start with Need not Demand
You can find more about this here
2. Who Does What – the mix of roles needed
At the heart of supporting people to live good and healthy lives are the need for friends and family, creativity, learning, meaningful activity (hobbies, volunteering), getting out of poverty, navigating the system to get access to services (finances, care, education, health), eating well and being physically and mentally active. No GP appointment can meet this need.
Whilst there is a place for professionals where people need help coping and navigating, the biggest impact comes from people helping each other. The ambition for social prescribing relies on a multitude of volunteers, coordinated by a few volunteer health champions, in turn supported by employed people who nurture, facilitate, develop, ensure probity and governance, and broker funding. Where the ambition of ‘social prescribing’ works well at scale it had this mixture of roles.
3. What is is and What it isn’t
Employing a link worker in itself does not constitute social prescribing.
Where ‘social prescribing’ – taking an asset-based approach works it changes not just the relationship with local people, but how the NHS / Primary Care goes about its work. It catalyses or is part of a new model of care. That means it will evolve, and as it does so no doubt the language will change too.
The energy, exuberance, and happiness we found on our visits was hard to describe but those we met were definitely living a better life.
Here is a Vlog with all that on it!!
Becky Malby
Becky Malby and Guest Blogger Tony Hufflett (who wrote most of this!)
Understanding Who Attends Frequently
We know that the people who turn up frequently (frequent attenders) in General Practice are now who we think they are. In my last blog on this topic Frequent Attenders – Breaking the Cycle in Primary Care we shared that about about half of these people are ‘struggling with life’ and not the stereotypical ‘complex chronic co-morbidities’ that typifies the discussion about how to manage them.
Since then we have looked a deeper at the data from across a dozen practices. What surprises us overall is how little is known in any general practice about who these people are and why they attend. What we see is a pattern of generalising the narrative about people who attend frequently from the few who are practically camped out in the practice (the outliers). Tony refers to this as ‘anchoring bias’(1). These 5-10 people are the exception not the rule for frequent attendance.
So who are the majority of people who turn up frequently – the small proportion of people that take up the majority of appointments?
Universally we see that around 5% of a practice’s patients will use around 30-40% or more of GP appointments. These will be a range of weekly to monthly patients – frequent attenders who come 10-30 times or more a year to see a GP. In my last blog I set out how to understand and meet these people’s needs.
We find it helpful to zoom in on the top 100 patient attenders at a practice, to ask the practice to review and spot patterns. It’s a large enough number to escape from individual extreme cases.
In these top 100 patient attenders we will see huge variation between practices:
This variation plays itself out very similarly in percentage terms among all people who attend frequently not just the top 100. The nature of frequent attenders is very diverse – young vs old, clinical vs social factors, mental health prevalence and so forth is hugely variable.
There are many ways of looking at this – below for example are five broad typologies of frequent attenders and their prevalence in some practices, some of which are only a few hundred yards apart:
Example variation in typology of frequents across 8 London practices:
But here is the key issue that surprised us.
This variation can’t be explained by population type, it’s more associated with practice’s behaviour than the demographics or health profile of the population.
Of course, a practice’s list demographic and environment will influence this, but it is clear that the system of access and practice priorities and systems are even more dominant. This means that the practice is co-creating the attendance pattern of people who attend frequently.
Most of your top attenders this year will not attend so frequently next year.
That doesn’t sound right does it? But it’s a phenomenon called ‘regression to the mean’. Data shows that only about 30-40% of people attending frequently are long-term consistently high attenders. So sadly, “fixing” these individual cases, outside those 30%-40%, doesn’t fix the skew of resources, and in fact doing nothing at all will make most of them attend less in a year’s time. However, their place will be taken by someone else. Your pattern of top attendance will look the same in a years’ time but with different patients in it
Real improvement is not about fixing individuals, it’s about spotting patterns, understanding cause and making lasting changes and improvements.
Learning: Practices need first to understand who their frequents are; the different sub-groups within them and most importantly how the practice itself is creating these patterns.
What can the Practice Do?
We set out the key starting points in my previous blog:
Do read the previous blog – but here is an update:
Here are other things that we see directionally and that we believe to be true:
Continuity
Even in practices where there is a belief in the importance of GP constancy or micro-team work on consistency; or some attempts to create a flagged ‘usual’ doctor, the continuity data is usually still shockingly low for frequent attenders.
A “typical” person who is attending frequently, based on a median across 12 different practices will:
The only exception appears to be when there is a practice-wide strong commitment to achieving continuity and very clear system starting at reception to guide patients towards it.
What can PCNs do?
Those people who are in your top 10 are people bouncing around the system, they are turning up in multiple services. For these people whilst continuity might help, if they have an acuity which is outside the capability of a single general practice to solve you need wider support.
In my blog on the Purpose of PCNs one clear purpose was Delivering Complex Integrated Care – i.e. collaborating across practices in a place to deliver solutions together with partners (other services e.g. social care) to meet complex needs. In high performing health systems this is a core and critical purpose for collaborations in Primary Care.
Working with PCNs I suggest that every practice undertakes a ‘deep dive’ into the notes of a few of their ‘top 5-10’ frequent attenders. Make a note of what services they access when (from community to A&E to MH to the practice). List those attendances and the reasons for them. Bring these notes to the PCN meeting and together see if you can spot any patterns. Are there any issues that are common across them all? Can you see something that would help if you worked together with your partner services? These ‘complex but unstable’ patients are being failed by the current system of organising. What can you do differently that stops them bouncing around the service with terrible consequences for themselves and their families?
Too often we talk to PCNs who are overwhelmed by discussions about contracting, DES, VAT – getting sucked into the ‘old transactional world’ of the NHS. It’s a terrible waste of PCN CD skills. The work of PCNs has to make a real difference to patients who cannot be managed in a single practice.
Proactively managing frequent attenders is a win-win-win situation:
FAQs
What have you based this on?
In collaboration with the LSBU Healthcare Innovation Lab, Primary Care Quality Academy, we have worked in detail with 30-40 practices in London. The lab work is a year-long programme with each practice starting with a “data readiness” stage including a practice diary audit of appointment appropriateness and access turn-away rates. Many of them have also collaborated with us in a deep-dive analysis on frequent attenders where we have extracted and analyses a full dataset of appointments
Can practices do this work themselves?
Yes. There is a rich data mine in each practice’s appointment book. However, practices often don’t have the time or ability to mine it. With commitment we believe that this is self-achievable however.
Does extending hours help?
Just providing “more” doesn’t address any of the fundamental challenges and opportunities we’re looking at here.
We do see a small but significant proportion of practices (10-20%) at critical access levels – where it’s really tough for patients to get in at all. Both staff and patients are seriously stressed and it’s not a place where thoughtful improvement decisions can be made. Here the resource skew is even stronger towards those who know the system.
Further Reading
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
2. Learn about regression to the mean
