GHP 2018 Pharmaceutical Manufacturing & Packaging Awards

4 GHP / Pharmaceutical Manufacturing & Packaging Awards 2018 , Most people put more effort into researching a holiday than they do their healthcare, checking reviews on TripAdvisor or Google to see what other customers thought. Healthcare is a service industry, just like hotels , but it is one of the few service industries where very little consumer guidance exists to help the public make an informed choice about what constitutes good clinical care. And equally, if you asked people what “good” looked like in medicine, many would struggle to answer. There is a large historical and cultural explanation for this. Medical professionals, especially in the UK, have been held in such high esteem by the public that no-one questioned the advice or the quality of treatment they received, believing that every doctor, nurse and physiotherapist was providing the very best care. Realistically, this can’t be the case. Clinicians are like every other group of professionals – lawyers, bankers, teachers; and like these other groups, some provide a better level of service than others. However, unlike a bad experience at a restaurant, even when people are dissatisfied with the care they have received, they rarely question it; not wishing to dispute the judgement of the GHB17002 How to maintain clinical excellence and quality in ‘musculo-skeletal medicine’ By Clinical Director at Pure SportsMedicine, Claire Small www.puresportsmed.com medical profession. Because of the NHS, the message in the UK is that world class healthcare is free. It is not something that people need to pay for, and, because they don’t pay for it, it is not something that they value. Unfortunately, and more significantly, this has greater repercussions. It means that generally in the UK, it is not just healthcare that people do not value, but their health in general. The general attitude is that people do not invest in their health, not just financially, but also in terms on considering their personal choices in the way that they manage their health with things such as diet, exercise, sleep and stress. One interesting dilemma is that while people generally seem unwilling to invest in their health, the same cannot be said for their willingness to invest in fitness and well being, with people spending large amounts of their income on high quality gym offerings, personal training, clothing and equipment and books. The fitness industry has done a far better job than medicine in demonstrating its value to consumers as well as demonstrating the different levels of quality the industry provides to cater for consumer preferences. If musculo-skeletal medicine and the professionals that work in this field are to survive, there is an urgent need for those within the industry to focus on delivering clinically excellent healthcare and educating people to recognise and value this. And valuing it means being willing to pay for it – whether through increased taxation to fund the NHS, or through paying privately for musculoskeletal services or private medical insurance. How businesses can continue to grow and improve services Focussing on quality and clinical excellence is the only way to ensure the growth of musculoskeletal medicine. In recent years, there has been an increasing focus on price, with clinicians using lower fees to attract self funding patients but also to secure contracts with insurance companies and other third parties. While attractive in the short term, any commercial model that does not consider outcomes and effectiveness is unsustainable, as a lack of clinical effectiveness ultimately necessitates further treatment, costly investigations, avoidable surgical intervention and additional conservative treatment and rehabilitation; often associated with additional period of work absenteeism. Focusing on cost per treatment will lead to a “race to the bottom” by providers as they seek to undercut each other, and ultimately reduce the level of quality in healthcare. Pure Sports Medicine is of the strong opinion that value based healthcare is most suited to the successful management of MSK disorders, but also to the success of all commercial organisations involved in the private healthcare market. The move to such a model will require time, investment and collaboration between all groups, but the ultimate goals should be improved quality of healthcare for patients, appropriate financial recognition of the skills and abilities of clinicians and the organisations they work within, and cost savings for funders in avoiding unwanted spend. In order to move to a value based healthcare model, several steps are required: ± ± All healthcare providers must start to classify the patients they are seeing using validated diagnostic codes so treatment effectiveness and costs for different conditions can be reviewed. ± ± All healthcare providers must collect validated outcome measures for the patients they see to determine the cost- effectiveness of their services. Once significant amounts of data have been collated by both providers and funders, analysis can be undertaken to determine the appropriate spend on a