Supporting the most vulnerable: why pharma should get behind the NHS’ healthcare equity campaign

In the North, if you’re old, male, and poor – you’re twice as likely to die of lung cancer. There are similarly stark nationwide discrepancies by socio-economic group, race, disability and gender.

Challenges around healthcare equity are taking up a lot of NHS brain space.

It’s a national priority after all – according to the Operational Planning Guidance 2023/24, all systems must continue to address healthcare inequalities and deliver on the Core20PLUS5 approach – ensuring support for the most deprived and unequal 20% of their populations.

There are lots of opportunities for NHS/industry partnership – on patient identification, reaching vulnerable groups, disease awareness and pathway change in struggling areas, to name just a few.

Many of our pharma clients at Wilmington Healthcare want to know how they can align with and support this agenda.

The first element is to properly understand healthcare inequity – which regions and systems they are affecting, what the discrepancies in access and outcomes are for patients in your therapy area, and what the total system costs are for inaction?

For example, poorer access to diagnosis services in cancer are connected with patients entering the system with later-stage tumours – which are more difficult to treat and require far more use of healthcare resources.

What’s the likelihood of patients with inequality markers appearing at more advanced disease stages? You could explain the impact this will have on services and the impact of further undiagnosed and untreated waves.

Wilmington Healthcare has been creating dashboards for our pharma clients demonstrating such inequity, allowing them to visualise, interpret, assess and engage around the impact of the inequities on the NHS.

These can help you benchmark a target system against the national picture, or other organisations, to demonstrate value in providing effective care in the most appropriate setting, freeing up capacity for secondary care providers to perform surgery and other priority treatment that have been put on hold up until now.

Among providers, you can view admission rate difference between those most and least deprived appearing in your target organisation, to start conversing around access and community care options.

A client was shown that the rate of COPD emergency admissions (per 100,000 population) in the most deprived quintile is roughly three times higher than in the least deprived quintile.

Reducing unnecessary admissions to hospital is uppermost in NHS minds. So, you can align on earlier and more accurate diagnosis, increasing access to pulmonary rehabilitation, encouraging better disease control and enabling better self-management to improve outcomes and reduce exacerbations.

All these are areas pharma can leverage, by showing ideal pathways, supporting disease awareness and patient education, identifying appropriate patient groups and of course through the appropriate use of drugs and disease management therapies.

There are three major benefits to pharma from aligning with the health equity agenda.
First, it’s about both NHS and industry needing to identify patients.

Through disease awareness campaigning and data management via the use of such tools as Wilmington Healthcare’s Inequalities Dashboard, patients can be brought forward.

Second, it’s about outcomes. Medicines’ overall benefit is better realised when used at the appropriate point in patients’ journeys and when they turn up late, as is happening, they’re less effective.

We’re finding that rural communities are particularly hard to reach. Certain ethnic groups may have barriers in language that can affect their understanding of their treatment plan.  Deprived communities often suffer poorer mental health, which creates barriers to effective self-management.

Third, it’s about partnership. There isn’t always the bandwidth or capacity there to properly address inequity within systems. Pharma, with its data management skills, patient mapping, pathway flow information and awareness of unnecessary variation can add value.

Feedback from our clients and our NHS network reveals that communicating on healthcare equity can make all the difference when engaging with decision-makers – it really is an area of shared interest and a way of starting – and continuing – vital conversations with your customers.

The Inequalities Tracker is part of the Quantis suite of tools, designed to improve patient outcomes by enabling your organisation to support the NHS in improving diagnostic and treatment pathways.

Quantis utilises and cross-references five years of healthcare data from multiple health and social care sources to deliver balanced, objective and outcome-focused insights.

Get in touch at marketing@wilmingtonhealthcare.com to discover how we can work with you to create cutting-edge, compliant analytic tools that translate healthcare data into actionable insight.