Hospital – AQuAS Blog

PERIS and people: research assessment by AQuAS

30 Mar

The first call of the Strategic Plan for Research and Innovation in Health 2016-2020 (PERIS in Catalan) for funding research and innovation, still pending resolution, prioritizes programmes which foster talent and employability and programmes of excellence in knowledge.

Accordingly, four actions have been initiated by competitive tendering to finance:

The inclusion of scientists and technicians in national research groups
The increase of nursing professionals in order to free up some of their workday so they can do research work
Research projects aimed at primary care
Major programmes focusing on four different subjects: personalised medicine, regenerative medicine, cooperative independent clinical research and cohort studies.

How are the PERIS calls assessed to determine which applications deserve funding?

The criteria for assessment are defined by the order of the requirements, forgive the repetition, and the requirements of each call. This is the instrument that sets out the rules to determine which projects or people are susceptible to receiving finance. Some will always be discarded and, depending on the specific criteria and resources available, others chosen which are considered worthy of funding.

Deciding which criteria to use and how they are assessed/rated/applied is a powerful science policymaking tool to design the research system it aspires to be: excellence, the subject, the discipline, the age of the applicants, the territoriality of the organisations or foreseeable impact are different variables to bear in mind when deciding who is worthy of being able to develop their research.

The Research Team at AQuAS has been commissioned to manage this process of assessment. This is why we accompanied the General Manager for Research and Innovation of the Health Department, Dr Andreu, in the public presentations he gave in different health research institutions linked to hospitals. We were impressed by the attendance at these informative sessions.

The assessment has been done by a panel of experts involving a total of 42 research professionals throughout Catalonia and Spain. It has required intense activity given that more than 490 applications of a very high level were received.

Looking back after having completed the assessment of the this first call, we feel, more than ever, that we made the right decision by putting people in the centre of the PERIS logo, large and circled by a prominent colour.

It is not only the plan itself which has been designed like this, to promote research with people at its centre, involving and motivating a great variety of professional profiles. PERIS has been a catalyst for mobilisation in the health system and in health research, even before the starting gun was fired, as seen in the packed informative presentations and in the involvement of the participants in the assessment panels, working deep into the night.

As can be expected, getting the staff at the Agency for Health Quality and Assessment of Catalonia (AQuAS) involved, has not been difficult either. We are eager to contribute to this strategic project by using a key tool for selection, accountability, continuous analysis and improvement of opportunities which is what assessment is all about.

Long life to PERIS!

Post written by Núria Radó (@nuriarado) and Paula Adam (@PaulaAdam4).

***Full information available here:

Why is difficult to reduce low value clinical practices in a Hospital?

15 Dec

Within the framework of the Programa de Millora de la Pràctica Clínica (Programme for improvement in Clinical Practice) of the Vall d’Hebron University Hospital – VHIR Institut de Recerca (VHIR Research Institute) and in collaboration with the Essencial project, work has been done to explore what barriers health professionals (hospital doctors and nurses) come up against in order to implement clinical recommendations aimed at reducing inadequate practices or those of low clinical value. A group of 15 health professionals (with medical or surgical specialities) collaborated in two discussion sessions to identify these barriers. The work done by Dimelza Osorio of the Vall d’Hebron University Hospital and by Liliana Arroyo of the University of Barcelona has been really outstanding.

When talking about inadequate practices or those of low clinical value, we are referring to inappropriate health interventions in certain circumstances, whether it be because the risks involved outweigh the benefits, because their efficiency is not proven or because there is not a clear cost-benefit correlation. These low value practices are present in everyday clinical practice and can lead to an over-diagnosis and/or over-treatment, meaning diagnosing or treating a clinical condition in which there are no notable health benefits for patients.

The barriers identified can be classified into four levels: micro, meso, macro and those of the context. At a first level (micro), those deriving from the characteristics of professionals themselves were identified, such as the tendency for self-protection in the face of claims or legal problems (defensive medicine), dealing with uncertainty or having had bad experiences previously; scepticism towards scientific evidence as a result of out-dated or contradictory information; other attitudes of professionals such as inertia or resistance to change; and the lack of training. All these constitute barriers. Patients’ characteristics were also identified, such as their reluctances and demands; the figure of the expert patient or beliefs acquired in the past.

At a second level (meso), barriers as a result of the interaction between professionals and patients were identified. Some barriers have to do with the relationship between professionals; that is to say, difficulties related to clinical leadership, the coordination between different professionals (or specialists), or the cohesion within teams. There are also barriers of organisational leadership such as a lack of institutional support in legal issues, the inertia of the organisation itself, economic incentives, wrongly applied penalties or the lack of foresight of certain costs. And then barriers of information flow, namely, the inefficiency of information systems such as the lack of operating capacity of e-mailing, or intoxication due to an excess of corporate information.

At a third level (macro), barriers are influenced by the structure and management characteristics of a hospital and the Catalan health system. The healthcare conditions stand out, such as the burden of healthcare, the duration of the attention given to patients, or how much technology is used in care, that is, greater access to facilities and tests. But also the design of the health system, such as in the lack of systemic leadership, or the lack of coordination between different levels of healthcare (primary care, hospital care, social healthcare, ….) . And then also the characteristics of the health system like territorial differences and the legal and bureaucratic context.

Lastly, certain external factors to the health system (the context) can also lead to low value clinical practices persisting. Although a lot less present in this case, the political context and the influence from the media are included.

The importance of each barrier is shown in the following graph:

barreres-en

Potential solutions were explored or proposed in the same session so as to eliminate these barriers; a series of solutions have been proposed mainly related to the creation of a leadership strategy and a series of clear options, which require rationlising processes and using available information properly.

Post written by Maite Solans (@SolansMaite).

Public health care budget. A ten-year overview (part 2)

1 Oct

Joan MV Pons, Head of Evaluation AQuAS

If in the previous post we examined the public health care budget evolution in the last decade (2005-2015) and we compared its distribution by major service lines, in this second part we will look at diseases (health problems) as described by the WHO International Classification of Diaseases (ICD) where they categorize conditions by the affected organs (apparatus or systems) or by origin (in the graphic: pressupost = budget)

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