Primary Care payment systems to reduce health inequality

Event details

Centre for Health Economics Policy Forum

Health inequalities affect all modern societies: the more disadvantaged someone is, the worse their health tends to be. People living in the poorest parts of the country have much shorter lives and spend more time with health problems than those in the richest parts. The NHS in England has a legal duty to reduce these health inequalities but often its care is less effective for more disadvantaged people, making health inequalities worse.

One way to address this problem is to give more resources to health services that reduce inequalities, for example by paying GP practices to focus more on interventions that have greater benefits for more disadvantaged patients. In his talk, Nils will present recent research that seeks to answer how one might implement such equity weighting in the way GP practices are paid.

Nils Gutacker is Professor of Health Economics at CHE. His research focuses on the design and effectiveness of (non-)financial incentives, industrial organisation of health care markets, unwarranted variation in health care provision, measurement of health care quality using patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs), and health inequalities.

John Ford is an academic public health doctor and Senior Clinical Lecturer in Health Equity in the Wolfson Institute, Queen Mary University London. He is also a Honorary Public Health Consultant within the national team of NHS England and leads the Health Equity Evidence Centre which uses machine learning to create living maps of what works to address inequalities in primary care.