To evaluate the impact of the Year of Care approach to long-term condition management across Islington CCG, along with the design of an evaluation framework that could be used to track this impact over future years.
Islington Clinical Commissioning Group
Year of Care is a care planning system which aims to help patients in the management of their long-term conditions. It was launched across the Borough of Islington in the middle of 2013, and in 2015, Islington CCG commissioned Osca to evaluate the impact of the programme thus far.
The Year of Care approach involves both the integration of new systems in general practices, as well as a cultural shift to more person-centred care in the care planning conversations between health professionals and patients.
We co-created an evaluation strategy with Year of Care partners which involved an initial segmentation survey for the Islington practices to ascertain their awareness of the Year of Care approach and the level of integration thus far. Beyond this, we conducted interviews with practices at different levels of integration to better understand challenges and solutions they had used. And to support this qualitative analysis, we used data from the National Diabetes Database to look at health outcomes for patients diagnosed with diabetes across the different practices.
Based on the findings from the evaluation, we developed a framework and associated method of capturing data (qualitative and quantitative) against the quality, fidelity and health outcomes associated with the Year of Care approach. We’ve since been working with Islington CCG, Year of Care partners and the local Year of Care leads to implement this evaluation framework and develop an associated strategy.
In 2018, Islington CCG commissioned Osca to carry out a follow up evaluation, using the same framework to understand progress made since 2015. In addition to the practice survey, in partnership with Public Health, we analysed data on care plan numbers to develop proxies for both reach and quality.
The evaluation reports from both 2016 and 2018, and the associated tables of practice integration of the Year of Care approach, are still used by the clinical leads.