A document is circulating from NHS England and NHS Improvement (13 Aug 2018) on the current state of payment systems and clustering in mental health services in England.
It cites “local pricing rule 7” from the 2017/18 and 2018/19 National Tariff Payment System (NTPS) and reports on a survey of progress towards implementing the rule.
Here is what rule 7 said (p. 114):
Rule 7: Local prices for mental health services for working age adults and older people
a. Providers and commissioners must link prices for mental health services for working age adults and older people to locally agreed quality and outcome measures and the delivery of access and wait standards.
b. Providers and commissioners must adopt one of the following payment approaches in relation to mental health services for working age adults and older people:
i. episode of care based on care cluster currencies
ii. capitation, having regard to the care cluster currencies and any other relevant information, in accordance with the requirements of Rule 4(b) to (e)
iii. an alternative payment approach agreed in accordance with the
requirements of Rule 4 (b) to (e).
Commissioners and providers (233 in total) were asked, “What payment approach do you have in place with your contracts for working age adults and older people in 2017/18?”
Here are the results:
So only 14 out of 223 responses (6%) reported a move away from block contracts – the whole point of the new payment systems! The report notes, “The results were disappointing.”
Reasons given by respondents for the poor implementation included:
- “limited local capacity to implement a new payment approach”
- “lack of shared confidence in cost and activity data”
- “uncertainty about how the proposed payment approaches would relate to the new operating models that would develop as part of integrated care systems.”
Services are supposed to be “clustering” the patients they see, irrespective of whether the clusters are used for payment. Rule 6 (p. 114):
Rule 6: Using the mental healthcare clusters
All providers of services covered by the care cluster currencies (see Annex B3) must record and submit the cluster data to NHS Digital as part of the Mental Health Services Dataset, whether or not they have used the care clusters as the basis of payment. This should be completed in line with the mental health clustering tool (Annex B3) and mental health clustering booklet to assign a care cluster classification to patients.
The research on clusters is damning. A recent study (Jacobs, et al., 2018) found that clusters were not very good at characterising the costs of different kinds of treatment and support (p. 7):
“Clusters are therefore not performing very well as a classification system to capture similarities and differences between patients. The categories of the current classification system appear to be neither case-mix nor resource homogeneous. We find evidence of large variation in terms of activity and costs within clusters and between providers.”
Surprisingly, the authors argue that clustering should continue (p. 7):
“… any payment approach needs to be underpinned by a solid classification system and to abandon the clustering approach now will thwart all progress. The clustering approach is already relatively well-established among most providers. Scrapping it all and starting from scratch risks putting mental health services back a decade in terms of developing a more transparent and fair funding system.”
Given the survey results above, it’s unclear how much progress would actually be thwarted by ditching clusters.
If you enjoy this sort of thing, you might also be interested in:
- What I think’s wrong with adult mental health Payment by Results (Dec 2013)
- Mental health services should not be paid by outcomes (Dec 2016)