Suffolk County Council and local health services are using data to help them create a more integrated service. The council wanted to find a way to shift more funding towards preventative work, and away from costly reactive services, improve the culture and effectiveness of performance management, and support the integration of frontline teams in health and social care.

This involved changing the way performance was measured, and what data was collected, tracked and shared, as well as putting a greater focus on outcomes and what matters most to residents.

What is it?

To do this, Suffolk has integrated data from health and social care, changed the performance metrics used by managers, and undertaken analysis of future service pressures and customer journeys.

From the outset, changing the organisational culture towards data was identified as a priority. Culturally, there had been an over-emphasis on using data to look retrospectively at activity, rather than understanding the future needs of the service. Data sometimes lacked consistency and was not comparable between health and social care.

In response, Suffolk created the Connect Measure, a set of shared outcomes, which health and social care could work towards. This framework contains 35 measures relating to important outcomes, such as the number of emergency admissions, ambulance call-outs, length of stay in hospital and delayed transfers of care.

It also contains measures of workforce development, integrated neighbourhood teams, neighbourhood networks, ‘reablement’ rates (where people are supported with daily living activities to develop the confidence to live independently at home), and public health.

How does it work?

The Connect Measure is shared across health and social care teams on a monthly basis to provide a top-level view of performance against outcomes. It also enables comparison of impact between teams.

Meanwhile, teams can also use this to look at workflows at an operational level. A weekly meeting is used to review waiting lists and decide which members of the integrated team are best placed to carry out visits.

The Connect Measure is also used to manage complex cases, for example by looking for opportunities to do joint visits or joint care and support plans.

What are the benefits?

By agreeing a set of shared outcomes across services, everyone is focused on and working towards the same objectives and understands what to prioritise. In Suffolk, this is having the following impact:

• Suffolk can diagnose problems in the system more easily, such as why there are high numbers of people who have delayed transfers of care from hospitals to residential care.
• Data integration means new preventative programmes can be evaluated better and support planning for further preventative work.
• Performance management is now based on meaningful outcome measures such as wellbeing, rather than crude input or output measures.
• The Connect Measure Set focuses the activity of multiple agencies on the same shared objectives, improving the likelihood of effective partnership working.
• Producing the Connect Measure Set revealed the opportunity to automate data collection that was once done by frontline staff. This improved the quality of data collected and frees up staff time.