Incentivising quality

OHE has been awarded a 3-year research grant by the Health Foundation’s Efficiency Research Programme to define an accurate measure of labour productivity in primary care and to identify its determinants, including workforce skill mix, technology and patient characteristics.

OHE Lunchtime Seminar with Rafael Bengoa and David Hunter, 14th October 2019. The seminar will discuss policy-level enablers and barriers for implementing large-scale health systems reforms.

Although the quality of palliative care in England and the wider UK is regarded as excellent, many patients receiving palliative care die in pain. This new study estimates that more than 5,000 patients would die in pain every year even under the ‘best practice’ palliative care such as that provided in hospices.

At the recent ISPOR Annual Conference, OHE’s Chief Executive, Professor Graham Cookson announced a new programme of work on Value 2.0: Assessing the Value of US Healthcare to be funded by PhRMA. Graham was joined by the Innovation and Value Institute’s Executive Director Jenn Bright, and Harvard Medical School Professor Bapu Jena.

A new paper by OHE and Health Education England on the value of international volunteers’ experience to the NHS has been published in Globalization and Heath.

Research just published in Public Administration Review, co-authored by OHE’s Professor Graham Cookson, demonstrates that contracting out auxiliary public services may lower the quality of the core service as well as the auxiliary service. Studying NHS cleaning services, the research shows that contracted out cleaning is cheaper but lower quality and leads to worse health outcomes including higher rates of hospital-acquired infections.

OHE Lunchtime Seminar with NHS Improvement Economics Team Members Sarah Karlsberg, Steven Paling and Júlia Esquerré. The seminar will present evidence on where NHS trusts can take practical steps to reduce cancer waiting times. The project won the 2018 John Hoy Memorial Award for the best piece of economic analysis produced by government economists.

The latest publication from Professor Graham Cookson in Public Organization Review finds that waiting time targets adopted in the English NHS as part of the ‘targets and terror’ performance management regime did indeed reduce key waiting time measures, but at the expense of other quality metrics such as hospital readmission rates i.e. the policy was output distorting.