Healthcare organisations collaborate on project to improve 'joined up' care for older people

Five leading independent healthcare organisations have launched a new 18-month project aiming to capture older people’s experiences of care coordination and from this develop a diagnostic tool that can effectively measure the quality of care on offer.

Reflecting the current public interest in the need for better co-ordinated health and social care, the participating organisations are the Nuffield Trust, Picker Institute Europe, The King’s Fund, International Foundation for Integrated Care and National Voices, a national coalition of health and social care charities.

Called ‘Developing a patient reported measure of care coordination’ and funded by US-based Aetna Foundation, the project is designed to help health and care providers to improve the coordination of care. To do this, a survey tool will be developed to measure how older people and service users experience care when it is delivered by multiple organisations. This work will allow health and social care services in the UK and internationally to measure the quality of integrated care from the perspective of their users.

Ruth Thorlby, senior policy fellow at the Nuffield Trust said: “Better joined up health and social care services is a priority for most modern healthcare systems and the English NHS is no exception.

“With a series of Government and locally-led initiatives currently underway to encourage more co-ordinated care, this work will provide us with a robust way of establishing baselines and measuring progress from the perspective of patients and service users themselves.”

As joined up care is critical for older people with long-term conditions, such as dementia and diabetes, the tool will be designed to understand the perspectives of people aged 65 and over with at least one long-term medical condition.

Don Redding, director of policy at National Voices said: “When care is fragmented it affects patients and carers and can have a detrimental impact on their quality of life. But we currently have no way to assess the experience of service users with regard to care coordination. This is a major gap both here and in other countries, which this tool will help to fill.”

It is hoped that when developed the tool will be a reliable, valid, and easy-to-use instrument able to be used by different kinds of local services, and not restricted to one type of provider. The survey tool will be developed and tested among older patients and service users in England. If successful, it will support improvements in the commissioning and delivery of well-coordinated, integrated care in the UK, and potentially be of relevance to other user groups and for quality improvement efforts on the international stage.

The project, which gets underway this month, will be based on a literature review combined with input from patients/service users and their representative groups. This will be followed by the development of a tailored questionnaire that will be fully piloted and tested. The final tool set will be available for use in the summer of 2015.