By Mark Smulian | 4 December 2014
Community health services need a similar level of scrutiny as that given to hospitals if they are to succeed in helping people to live independently, the King's Fund has said.
The think-tank's report Managing quality in community health care services said service providers were severely hampered by the absence of national indicators to help measure their performance.
This meant there was a lack of data for services including community nursing, occupational therapy, physiotherapy, podiatry and speech and language therapy, with service quality and patient outcomes, ‘largely unknown at national level’.
Such services absorb some £10bn of the NHS budget, the report noted.
The King's Fund argued this degree of opacity "’presents a serious risk that poor and declining quality cannot be quickly identified, particularly in a climate where providers are facing growing demand for their services and significant workforce challenges’.
A much stronger focus on quality was needed if community health care was to effectively support people to remain well and independent outside hospitals.
King’s Fund assistant director of policy Catherine Foot said: ‘If policy-makers and service leaders are serious about their ambition to deliver more care closer to home, the community sector urgently needs the same level of both support and scrutiny that the hospital sector receives.’
Among the report's recommendations were thatthe Department of Health and other national bodies create a clear ‘road map’ for radically improving quality measurement and benchmarking, and that clinical commissioning groups, regulator Monitor and NHS England develop better pricing and contracting models for outcomes-based commissioning.
