This week, for the first time the MyNHS website published
some information on services for people with learning disabilities in England,
broken down to the level of individual Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs). The relevant webpage is here – although I found it quite slow to load, it did work
for me in the end.
Although knowledge is not necessarily power, any steps
towards transparency are to be welcomed, and although I don’t know this I guess the hand of Dominic Slowie behind it. Dominic will be much missed as National
Clinical Director for Learning Disabilities. In this blogpost I simply want to
describe what information has been published online to help people understand
what is (and isn’t) there when looking up their local CCG area.
There are two types of information published online here (a
much wider set of information about people with learning disabilities broken
down by local authority area in England is available here).
The first is the number of people with learning disabilities
in specialist inpatient services commissioned by the CCG. This is written as
the number of people in inpatient services per million total adult population
registered with GPs in the local area, so that areas with very different
population sizes can be compared. Overall, the median number of people in
inpatient services per million adult population (if you ordered the 209 CCGs
from lowest to highest, the median is the number reported by the CCG in the
middle) was 62 people in inpatient services per million adult population. As
the graph below hopefully shows, the variation is huge. Apparently, if you’re a
person with learning disabilities in Swindon or Wiltshire (where 16 people with
learning disabilities per million adult population are in specialist inpatient
services) you are nearly six times less likely to be put into an inpatient service
than if you live across Cumbria and the North East (92 people per million).
Before marching to your local CCG offices with pitchforks (if
you can find them - they’re quite often hidden in business parks nowadays) there
are a couple of caveats to bear in mind about this information. The first is
that more than half of the people with learning disabilities in inpatient
services (and attributed in the online information to individual CCGs) are not
actually commissioned by CCGs. The latest NHS Digital Assuring Transformationdata for July 2016 reports that 1,175 people with learning disabilities (47%) were
in inpatient services commissioned by CCGs and 1,345 people (53%) were in
inpatient services commissioned by NHS England ‘specialist hubs’ (these are
regional ‘specialist’ commissioners who tend to commission more secure and forensic
services). So while I’m sure there are close working relationships between CCGs
and these specialist hubs, it’s important that NHS England share in this
transparency. This level of detail is available (for each CCG area, how many
people with learning disabilities are in inpatient services commissioned by
CCGs and by these hubs) (Table 10 here, if you’re interested) but is not in the
online information.
A second caveat is that information is set against
individual CCGs when it has been provided collectively. For example, all the
CCGs across Cumbria and the North East report the same number of people per
million (92, the highest numbers in the dataset) – presumably some individual
CCGs have lower numbers and some have even higher numbers. Finally, given the
pressure CCGs are under from NHS England to cut inpatient service numbers, it’s
important to bear in mind the ‘Daisy Unit’ phenomenon. The Daisy Unit is a newly
built 9-bed unit in the grounds of a psychiatric hospital, for people with ‘complex’
learning disabilities to ‘receive specialised services’. But apparently it’s
not an inpatient unit, it’s a ‘specialist residential home’. Coincidentally it’s
been commissioned by Wiltshire CCG, an area with the joint lowest inpatient
numbers in the country according to this online information.
The second type of information reported online is the
percentage of people with learning disabilities identified in GP registers who
had an annual health check. The median figure for this was 46.5%, so just less
than half of people identified as a person with learning disabilities with their
GP got an annual health check in the ‘average’ CCG. Again, the graph below
shows huge variation between CCGs. Apparently, if you live in the area of
Coastal West Sussex CCG (13%), you are 6.5 times less likely to have had an
annual health check than if you live in the area of Eastern Cheshire (85%).
Again, there are a few things to bear in mind when trying to
make sense of your local area. First, in fully 19 CCGs (9.1% of the total number
of CCGs), their information was so bad that a percentage could not be
calculated. Second, in the year reported, the age range of people of learning
disabilities eligible for an annual health check changed from 18+ years to 14+
years, so some areas may not have been very well prepared for this. Third, if a
local area is better at actively finding and registering people with learning
disabilities on GP registers their percentage is likely to go down (as the
number ‘under the line’ gets bigger). The online information does report the
total number of people with learning disabilities registered with GPs so it’s
worth looking at that as well as the overall percentage.
One thing I haven’t mentioned is the first column in the
webpage, a ‘panel assessment’ of CCGs when it comes to services for people with
learning disabilities. The headline figures are that 192 CCGs (91.9%) were
rated as ‘needs improvement’, 16 CCGs (7.7%) were rated as ‘performing well’,
and one CCG (0.5%) was rated as ‘greatest need for improvement’. Because the
panel only had two bits of information to go on, their rating system seems
quite straightforward – if a CCG was reported as having less than 20 people
with learning disabilities per million in inpatient services (3 CCGs) OR if a
CCG was reported as hitting 70% of more of people with learning disabilities
getting an annual health check (13 CCGs) they were rated as ‘performing well’.
As long as you’re doing well on one of these indicators, you can be doing badly
on the other one and still be ‘performing well’. With only two bits of
information, I’m not sure how useful this panel rating is, to be honest.
Hopefully this blogpost is useful if you’re interested in
looking up your local CCG. Whether these first steps towards transparency are
really designed to improve the accountability of CCGs to their local
populations, well that’s another question.
