Health Foundation response to National Audit Office report on developing new care models

Adam Steventon, Director of Data Analytics at the Health Foundation, said:

'The NHS has not yet gone as far as is needed in transforming care for patients, however, there are promising signs of improvements, even in the face of sustained funding and staffing pressures.

'We welcome the report published today by the National Audit Office, which confirms the importance of NHS England continuing to support local teams to develop new ways of delivering patient care and promoting health. We agree it’s crucial to continue evaluating their progress so that other areas can benefit from new ideas to improve care and understand what is working and what isn’t. Our evaluations have shown mixed results from the early stages of work undertaken by some vanguards, underlining the importance of learning from the very challenging task of transforming services.

'We know from our experience that staff require both space and support to effectively deliver change on the ground. We hope to see robust plans and adequate funding to back local areas to achieve this in the long-term plan for the NHS, expected in the autumn.'

Notes to editors

The Improvement Analytics Unit (IAU), a partnership between the Health Foundation and NHS England, has been undertaking evaluation of the Vanguards.

The IAU uses advanced statistical techniques to provide evidence of whether local change programmes are having an impact on improving the quality and efficiency of care.

So far evaluations on three vanguards have been produced, including:

• Principia care home initiative in Rushcliffe -  Where our analysis found that care home residents who received the enhanced support attended A&E 29% less frequently than similar care home residents in other parts of the country and were admitted to hospital as an emergency 23% less often.
• The reorganisation of urgent and emergency care in Northumberland – Where our analysis found that the changes to urgent and emergency care were associated with a 13.6% increase in A&E visits for people registered with a general practice in Northumberland CCG. On average, their A&E visits were 14.3 minutes shorter than would have been expected.
• The Sutton Homes of Care vanguard – Where overall, we found no strong evidence that Sutton residents in the study used hospitals more or less frequently than the matched control group. However, there were some indications that the Sutton residents might have experienced more emergency admissions than the matched control group, including more admissions that could be considered potentially avoidable through better care outside hospital.