Gauge for Primary Health Care

Gauge for Primary Health Care – Ambulatory care sensitive conditions in assessing performance of primary care services.

Objectives

Ambulatory care-sensitive conditions (ACSC) are conditions in which hospitalisations could be prevented by interventions in primary care. Hospital admissions due to ACSC have been used in recent years to indirectly evaluate effectiveness and quality of primary care. Our study investigated 1)the determinants of ACSC hospitalisations in terms of health care system and patient related factors, 2)their association to other indicators of quality and performance of primary care and 3) outcomes.

Implementation

ACSC hospitalisations  identified from the Hospital Discharge Register (1996-2013) and statistical methods that were developed for register based studies including age-standardized proportions, Poisson regression models for repeated measurements, and multilevel models. Trajectory modelling  used for identifying features predicting poor performance of primary care organisations will be used.

Partners

The project was a cooperation with researchers from the University of Helsinki, the Kuopio University Hospital districr, MRC Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, University of Glasgow, NHS Lothian Health Board, QUALICOP -project (coordinated in the Netherlands) and the VATT Institute for Economic Research.

Funding

The project was partly funded by the Academy of Finland.

Contact information

Ilmo Keskimäki
Research Professor
tel. +358 2952 47256
E-mail: [email protected]