How we are supporting health and care systems to address health inequalities
The Covid-19 pandemic shone a light on the health inequalities faced by our local communities – in how they can access services, in health outcomes and in life expectancy among many other factors.
Across the board, health and care systems are prioritising tackling health inequalities in our recovery from the pandemic. In this blog, EMAHSN Managing Director Nicole McGlennon discusses how the AHSNs can support this agenda to ensure new innovations and transformation benefit all our communities.
A new national AHSN Network health inequalities programme
The AHSN Network will be supporting ICSs to address health inequalities this year, with a new programme that is currently being developed called Inequalities in Healthcare Innovation Programme (InHIP). The programme is being developed by all AHSNs working with NHSE’s national Core20PLUS5 team and will be launched during autumn/winter 2022.
The programme will offer funding to East Midlands ICSs to support the identification and adoption of innovations and technologies that address the five clinical priorities within the national Core20PLUS5 strategy –maternity, severe mental illness, chronic respiratory disease, early cancer diagnosis and hypertension case-finding.
We will share more details once they are available; however we are particularly keen to build this programme around the health equality priorities of East Midlands ICSs, so would welcome early discussions with any systems interested in working with us on this key agenda.
Of course, many of our existing programmes also address health inequalities – for example our Proactive Care @ Home programme adopts a series of frameworks to help primary care to manage patients who have long term conditions and who may not have had regular contact with services during the Covid-19 pandemic.
We are working with Primary Care Networks across Leicester, Leicestershire & Rutland and in Northamptonshire to implement the frameworks, which support GPs to identify and target support for patients with long-term conditions. Between Sept 2021 and March 2022, this initiative has enabled a reduction of 45,159 patient condition optimisation targets from the long-term condition backlog lists, a fantastic achievement.
The methodologies from this programme have been adapted to help tackle wider health inequalities by the Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland Integrated Care System, working both with GP practices that proactively seek to implement the frameworks, and also identifying and offering support to those with the greatest backlog of unmanaged long-term-condition patients.
If you would like to know more, please get in touch by emailing emahsn@nottingham.ac.uk
Regional collaboration to address health inequalities
I have been delighted to take part in an important project led by the NHS Midlands and the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities – supported by the King’s Fund – which is bringing together health leaders from across the Midlands to work together to tackle health inequalities.
Health inequalities requires a ‘whole system’ response and through the coordination of NHS Midlands, partners are coming together from across the NHS, social care, public health and research.
The focus is to consider and plan together to address strategic and systematic issues, and key to this will be to learn from our experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic.
During Covid-19 we saw a significant acceleration in the adoption of technologies and new ways of working such as the rapid adoption of remote consultations within primary care and use of electronic repeat dispensing.
However, whilst these sorts of initiatives played an important role in the pandemic response, there is a risk with rapid adoption of new technologies and ways of working that the most vulnerable people in our society – seldom heard – get left behind.
Through our work with the East Midlands Patient and Public Involvement Senate we organised ‘Voices of Covid-19’, a project to capture the lived experiences of different people.
Some of these stories highlighted to me that, whilst innovation, technology and collaboration were fundamental to tackling the immediate pandemic challenges, many people – such as those with long-term conditions and people who were isolated for reasons such as geography or lack of access to the internet and digital technology – were unable to access the care they needed.
How we can support you now
While we are waiting on the outcome of these national and regional pieces of work, there are several ways in which we can support local systems now to address these challenges:
Horizon scanning
We are keen to discuss with ICSs how innovations within the AHSN Network innovation pipeline could be adapted and adopted to support local ICS priorities for tackling health inequality. We can access more than 1200 innovations from across the 15 AHSNs to find those that will help to address your specific challenges. Take a look at our horizon scanning information and get in touch if you think we might be able to help with something you are working on.
Health inequalities support
Our patient and public involvement and equality, diversity and inclusion team are also able to provide wider advice, support and guidance to health and care partners:
- We have developed a range of toolkits, guides and resources, and regularly organise training events around diversity, equality and inclusion
- We manage a series of patient leader networks across the East Midlands and can use our connections to help recruit patients from particular geographical areas, or with lived experience of different conditions, to get involved in service reviews and redesigns
- We produce other useful information, for example these summaries of key health inequality data for each of the East Midlands ICS areas and cities.
You can contact the team via emahsn@nottingham.ac.uk
Data analysis
Our Health Analytics and Evaluation Service has launched two new documents to explain more about the services they offer to the health and care system and to innovators to help them to understand and use the health inequalities data that is available to make better decisions. You can read these documents and a blog from Programme Manager Glen Howard on our website.
We look forward to working with you on this important agenda.
Author
Nicole McGlennon, Managing Director