Lambeth PCT ... Data Collection to make Service Modifications
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if commissioning agencies knew precisely which service modifications are effective in tackling ethnic health inequalities in, for example, diabetes and heart disease? You would know, for example, that one style of management was more effective than another, say, in cutting hypertension among African Caribbean men.
Lambeth PCT hopes to achieve just such knowledge with a sophisticated research project that ties together clinical data on patients about self-ascribed ethnicity, language preference and religious affiliation.
Datanet recruits local practices and helps them to improve their collection of data on ethnicity, language and religion. It also helps clean up their clinical data. This data is then tied together for research. The Datanet project is based on a partnership of Lambeth PCT with the Department of General Practice at Guy’s, King’s and Thomas’s and the South London Primary Care Research Network (STARNET). Funds come from the St Thomas and Guy’s charity. So far 26 practices within the PCT, with a combined population of 185,000, have joined up.
“The first project is called ‘Identifying and reducing ethnic inequalities in the management of people with psychosis’,” says Dr Richard Williams, a local GP and project leader. “Datanet will be used to examine the difference in prevalence of psychosis between the African Caribbean and general populations. It will look at issues of access to services and develop service modifications to address these. In the long run, we should be able to do equity audits on a large number of health care activities. In time, lots of small modifications to services could make a big difference to health outcomes.”