Economic modelling tool
London’s PCTs spend approximately £362 million a year on hospital admissions in the last year of a person’s life. The end of life care good practice guide recommends that commissioners should examine their unplanned and planned care expenditure within end of life care services and commission services that will deliver improvements in quality of care, whilst taking the opportunity to move care into community settings. This may involve transfer of resource from the acute sector and may lead to an overall cost reduction.
To support London’s commissioners in their decision making for end of life care, an economic analysis of expenditure, focusing initially on acute admissions has been undertaken at PCT, cluster and regional level. These are available on request.
Alongside this, the end of life care project engaged with commissioners, clinicians, public bodies and academics to develop an end of life care economic modelling tool. The tool enables commissioners to examine PCT expenditure on end of life services, in an acute setting, over a period of 12 months and explore the financial impact of commissioning a more community based pathway.
The tool identifies reducing the level of emergency admissions for a PCT and is pre-populated with local data that informs the potential reduction in inpatient admissions and other existing budgets. This is based on statistical data relevant to the PCT.
An example of the modelling tool has been pre-populated with indicative values from national and local end of life care service initiatives to demonstrate how the tool operates. All assumptions made on community services and related costs shown within the illustration are included to demonstrate how the tool can be used. The tool has been designed to be as flexible as possible so that commissioners can enter assumptions based on their own, local end of life care services.
Individual pre-populated PCT tools are available on request.
