Earlier this year, we found that only 10% of people are offered a choice of adult hearing services. How can commissioners fix this so that people get the choice of provider they are entitled to?
Since 2012, a process called ‘any qualified provider’ has been used to offer a choice of provider for a number of community services in many areas of England. Adult hearing services were one of the first services commissioned using this process and we estimate that about 60% of commissioners now use it for these services.
Since publishing our report in June, we’ve continued to explore how to make patient choice work better. As part of this, we’re working closely with Huddersfield Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) to increase the effectiveness of information available to patients about their choices.
Huddersfield CCG introduced choice in adult hearing services nearly 3 years ago. They think that choice has had a positive impact for people in their community with hearing loss by increasing access to care, for example by offering appointments at a number of community providers rather than just at the hospital.
Now that patients are able to choose their provider, the CCG are keen to explore ways of making choice work better – in particular by improving the information available to patients about their options.
Use provider information on service delivery
Each month the CCG receives lots of information from providers reporting on service delivery. This includes details of the numbers of patients seen, as well as key performance indicators relevant to the service, like how many patients are attending follow-up appointments.
The CCG has told us that currently this reported information is only used to help manage contracts – helping the commissioner ensure providers are delivering services of sufficient quality. The CCG want to go further and use this information to help patients make good choices.
We believe that this information is potentially a valuable resource for patients to help guide their decision making when they are choosing a hearing services provider. The challenge for us and Huddersfield CCG is to make sure that this information is available in a way that is most helpful to patients.
Tailor relevant information for patients
We want to find out what matters to patients when they choose their provider. Is it location? Waiting times? The range of hearing aids available? The ease of getting follow up appointments or new batteries?
We are going to test different options with local people in Huddersfield to find out what sort of information is most relevant to them and also how and when they would like to receive it.
We will be doing this by developing different options and testing them with local people. This will help us to come up with useful and relevant types of information to give patients more knowledge about the things that are really important to them. We will also be working closely with local GPs and practice managers to get their views on any solution we come up with and gain support.
Help other CCGs learn from this work
As far as we know, this is the first time that a CCG has tried to use information from hearing services providers to help patients make choices about which provider is best for them.
One way we will be doing that is through contributing a commissioning framework for hearing services. This is part of the implementation of the 2015 Action Plan on Hearing Loss, and we will be closely involved in developing support for commissioners to help improve hearing loss services.
We hope to take what we learn from our work with Huddersfield CCG to show how better information can make a difference for patients.
Find out more about our study into adult hearing services by reading our full report.
Are you making service data available to support patient choice? If so, we’d like to hear from you to build our knowledge of how commissioners are innovating.