Greater Manchester Health and Social Care Partnership – Qualitative Evaluation of Focused Care
Focused Care involves a programme of support for individuals with complex needs, delivered by general practice teams based in areas of high deprivation. Focused Care is a response to the interlinking complexity of clinical need, social challenges and often mental health or addiction issues. Patients in this cohort do not fit easily into medical categories of care, but are a population that show poor health outcomes in terms of life expectancy, morbidity and premature onset of multiple chronic conditions. Patients often engage poorly with services such as outpatients or follow up appointments.
Focused Care commenced in Oldham and is currently being delivered in six locality areas of Greater Manchester through three different funding streams. In April 2019, SQW was commissioned to conduct a qualitative evaluation of the work funded through the Greater Manchester Health and Social Care Partnership (GMHSCP) Transformation Fund. GMHSCP has invested in an initial two year 'proof of concept' programme (running from April 2018 to March 2020) to explore the impact of scaling up the Focused Care Programme into practices in areas of significant deprivation.
The Focused Care Programme contributes to the Greater Manchester Population Health Plan, the emerging GM Programme relating to addressing the wider determinants of health and wellbeing impacting the people of Greater Manchester. Person and Community Centred Approaches (including social prescribing) and cross-sector collaboration are examples of methods by which the Population Health Team seek to achieve this goal.
Focused Care emerged from grassroots general practice over a period of eight years, with scaling up taking place more recently. The impact of, and learning regarding, this scaling will be the focus of SQW's evaluation. SQW's methodology will involve in-depth interviews, focus groups, observations and a systematic document review.
For further information regarding SQW's evaluation, please contact Lauren Roberts, SQW Director, via lroberts@sqw.co.uk.
