Investigating the impact of the introduction of a named GP assigned to patients 75 and over on their continuity of care and emergency hospital admission

By 2024 one-in-ten of the UK population will be aged over 75. To meet the challenges of an ageing population and to better serve those living with complex health needs the National Health Service (NHS) Employers and General Medical Services (GMS) have agreed that all patients aged over 75 should have a named accountable GP to provide personalised care to keep them healthy and out of hospital. General practices were required to follow this policy from mid-2014 onwards.

The ultimate aim of this project is to find out whether this policy has been effective. We will examine whether the introduction of the assignment of a named GP to every patient aged 75+ has led to better continuity of care. If continuity of care is improved, we will assess whether this leads to fewer emergency hospital admissions. We will obtain data from a random sample of 30,000 patients aged 65-85 in 2012, from the Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD), which includes information on patients in several hundred general practices across England. The CPRD is linked with data which show which patients have been admitted to hospital. The requested data contain information on every contact each patient had with their general practice and any admissions to hospital between April 2012 and April 2016. This includes a two-year period before and two-year period after the introduction of the named GP scheme. This will allow us to compare a patient’s continuity of primary care and a patient’s experience of emergency hospital admission before and after the scheme was introduced while taking into account factors such as age, co-morbidities and GP practice services. This means we can test our hypothesis that having a named GP improves continuity of primary care and so, in turn, decreases risk of having an emergency hospital admission.

Amount awarded: £65,859.00