Reducing unplanned care: a new paradigm

Abstract

Each local healthcare economy faces a challenge. The rising numbers of accident and emergency (A&E) attendances and emergency hospital admissions (unplanned care) are neither affordable, nor desirable. The current financial climate has only increased this challenge. Local healthcare economies now not only need to reduce the total number of each from one financial year to the next, but to do this in an absence of ideas and approaches that work. Data analysis from NHS Wakefield District has been used to inform a new paradigm on how the total levels of unplanned care are viewed and understood. The analysis shows that local healthcare economies should embrace at least two main findings, if they are to reduce the totals. The first is to work from the basis that the totals for unplanned care in any financial year are driven by the number who experience them, rather than by the number who have more than one unplanned event in a year. The second specifically concerns emergency admissions. Individuals who experience an admission in a financial year are unlikely to have experienced one in those before it.