Evaluation of the Integrated Personal Commissioning (IPC) programme

Posted on 19 February 2020

Integrated Personal Commissioning (IPC) is an approach to joining up health and social care, and other services where appropriate.

Doctor and patient

The purpose is to enable service users, with help from carers and families, to combine and direct the resources available to them and control their care. In total, IPC was rolled out in 17 areas across England.

The Department of Health and Social Care commissioned an independent evaluation of IPC. The evaluation was carried out by a consortium led by SQW, in partnership with the Centre for Health Economics (CHE) at the University of York, among others. The evaluation comprised three strands of work: process, economic (led by CHE) and impact.

Briefly, the process evaluation found that services made good progress in setting up IPC. The delivery of IPC to service users started slowly but picked up over time. Service users’ and carers’ experience of IPC was mixed with service users having different desires or abilities to exercise choice. Nonetheless, and overall, service users were positive about their experiences of IPC.

The economic analysis estimated the costs of setting up and delivering IPC. The results suggest that IPC costs more than standard care. These results are highly uncertain due to limitations of the data.

The impact evaluation compared service users’ social-care related and health related quality of life, as well as general wellbeing, before and after receiving IPC. The results indicate that social-care related quality of life increased with little change observed in health-related quality of life and general wellbeing.

The learning from IPC has already informed the development of the comprehensive model for personalised care. This model, which is one of five major practical changes of the NHS outlined in the Long Term Plan, is now being rolled out across the country to ensure personalised care becomes business as usual.

The final report of the evaluation can be found here. It provides a full description of the findings from the three strands of the evaluation.