Northumberland Care Trust - Equity in Primary Medical Services
Started March 2009 - completed May 2010

The Northumberland Care Trust and the Joint Negotiating Group of the LMC wish to improve fairness of funding to practices across Northumberland.  This independent research and report will help to address the perceived inequity in Northumberland PMS contracts, particularly for practices which have large numbers of patients in rural areas.  The approach taken to the work was to use both PCT-held data as well as practice data and to compare this with the numbers used to develop the national resource allocation (“Carr-Hill”) formula.
 
There were six main stages to the work:
  • Review of the key literature - a focused review of the existing policy, research and grey literature
  • Collation of data held by the Care Trust - to gain a better understanding of primary medical services in Northumberland
  • Analysis of current allocation to Practices – to provide a comparison to the findings from the wider work
  • Scoping Work with four pilot Practices - to test/refine the dataset being requested from practices and the tools/processes to be used for the data collection.  The project team also worked with this group to develop/refine the qualitative data sought from practices and to identify the best way to obtain it
  • Fieldwork and data collection - the findings from the first four stages of the project were brought together in an interim report to shape the fieldwork and data collection with practices across the Care Trust.
  • Analysis and final report.

This is a groundbreaking piece of research, commissioned by a PCT, which is likely to inform primary care providers and commissioners throughout the UK.