Hospital coordination and integration with social care in England: the effect on post-operative length of stay

Fernández, José-Luis ORCID: 0000-0002-4190-7341, McGuire, Alistair ORCID: 0000-0002-5367-9841 and Raikou, Maria (2018) Hospital coordination and integration with social care in England: the effect on post-operative length of stay. Journal of Health Economics, 61. pp. 233-243. ISSN 0167-6296

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Abstract

In spite of significant policy interest in improving the integration of health and social care services, little is known about the economics of coordination across the two sectors. We specify a Markov queuing model and use data collected from administrative records to estimate the link between two proxy indicators of across-sector complexity of discharge arrangements and post-operative length of stay in hospital for older people undergoing hip replacements. The results suggest that the number of local authorities involved in care planning and commissioning of social care services for discharges from a given hospital is significantly positively correlated with longer post-operative lengths of stay. A particularly strong effect is found between variability through time in the number of authorities involved in discharges from a given hospital and lengths of stay. The results suggest that improving information systems and joint assessment processes used during the discharge of patients with social care needs is likely to achieve significant efficiency gains in the health care system as a whole.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-healt...
Additional Information:	© 2018 The Authors
Divisions:	Health Policy Care Policy and Evaluation Centre
Subjects:	R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine R Medicine > RD Surgery
Date Deposited:	05 Jul 2018 14:07
Last Modified:	10 Nov 2024 00:45
Funders:	Department of Health
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/89072

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