Comparing performance of urgent care providers across England - Primary Care Foundation report (April 2021)

Summary

This report by the Primary Care Foundation considers the question: 'Is the drive to improve outcomes and the quality of integrated urgent care being compromised by poor data quality?'

The report highlights that monitoring the performance of NHS contracts is vital to allow commissioners to understand and compare the effectiveness of services, and that this monitoring cannot occur without accurate data. The authors conducted a detailed study of current data before exploring how issues in the system might be overcome. The report aims to build consensus for change within the urgent care sector.

Content

The report makes some key observations around patient safety in relation to the patient journey through integrated urgent care:

"Although cases are passed from one organisation or IT system to another there is less functionally integrated management of the resources between the two parts than was envisaged, there is little management reporting of the whole of the IUC journey and there are unnecessary delays because of the number of steps involved, each with its own queue. This results in a service that is less effective than it could be in getting the patient to the right place for treatment, that makes less effective use of the resources available within the system than it could do and that can delay patient care to such an extent that clinical risk begins to rise."

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