I work as a modeller for CLAHRC Wessex. In part that means I spend a lot of time speaking to health care professionals and commissioners about their priorities and teasing out if modelling could help. More and more often I am asked “can we model the whole health care system?”.
So it’s been a few months since the last update on our work, so where are we now?
Well our Younger Onset Dementia Assessment project is now starting to interview patients, carers and clinicians about their experiences of care in younger onset dementia. This will help define our assessment toolkit for testing and implementation in a wider group of people with younger onset dementia. An important part of this study will be to improve the recording of quality of life (QoL) in people with younger dementia, and helping better understand what factors influence QoL in this particular group of patients and their carers.
NHS clinical commissioning groups across the UK are all focused on improving patient care while facing the pressures of an aging population, increasing volumes of patients with multiple complex health problems and the stark political reality of the need to cut costs.
The complexity of these decisions and how to improve care is often enormously underestimated in the popular media. Take for example, the waiting time performance of accident and emergency (A&E) departments in the UK.
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