In his research paper presentation for the HSR UK Conference 2020,  Dr Manbinder Sidhu discusses the work of the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) funded Birmingham, RAND Europe and Cambridge (BRACE) Rapid Evaluation Centre in understanding the early impacts of vertical integration within general practice and hospital workforces.

Fostering greater integration between primary and secondary care, sustaining primary care in the face of workforce shortages, and managing patient flows to acute hospitals are recurring themes in United Kingdom (UK) health care policy. One approach which might address such challenges is acute hospitals taking over the running of general practices, a form of ‘vertical integration’ in health care. Early impacts have been reported from one of these trusts, including a reduction in emergency hospital admissions and increasing access to GP appointments, but this has not been subject to independent evaluation. Beyond that, little is known about this model of integration.

 The project team for this work are:  Manbinder Sidhu, Jon Sussex and Jack Pollard. Download the presentation in full here. Find out further details of this evaluation project on the BRACE website.

The Health Services Research UK Conference 2020 will be taking place between 1-3 July 2020 as a virtual and online conference and is completely free to anyone who wants to attend.  You can register for the conference here. The research papers and workshop sessions of the conference have been pre-recorded and are being uploaded onto the HSRUK website on a daily basis from 15 June 2020.

HSR UK will be livestreaming all the plenary sessions and making all of them, along with the research presentations, available to watch on their YouTube channel.

You can also follow the conference, and discussion about research presentations, on Twitter by following the hashtag #HSRUK2020