Blog: Population health management - why is it important?

Integrated care is a key focus for all health and social care systems, yet efforts in the past to truly integrate care have often glanced over the importance of the wider determinants of health and the broader health of our local populations.  

In Lancashire and South Cumbria, we have some truly fantastic and innovative programmes of work and we have really started to grasp at this missed opportunity and challenge the system to improve the health of the population by moving care closer to home and transforming from a reactive to proactive model focused on health and prevention rather than illness and treatment.

What we now need to do is join up the dots to improve health and care at scale (iHACS – our framework for population health management). 

We know we have everything we need in the system, we have the data and intelligence, the excellent clinical and system leadership and truly fantastic quality improvement programmes, but we often don’t use these to their full potential. 

The inherent value of a population health perspective is that it facilitates integration of knowledge across the many factors that influence health and health outcomes – this is our aim, we need to mobilise everyone and activate and empower not only individual people but practitioners to improve population health.

Healthier Lancashire and South Cumbria held its first Population Health Summit in July and organisers were delighted to have been joined by around 140 delegates from across the system and further afield, showing enthusiasm and commitment to driving the population health agenda forwards and improving health and care at scale in Lancashire and South Cumbria.

The day-long summit was opened by Dr Amanda Doyle, GP and Chief Officer for Lancashire and South Cumbria integrated care system (ICS) and chaired by Dr Sakthi Karunanithi, Senior Responsible Officer for Prevention and Population Health and Director of Public Health at Lancashire County Council.

It featured a diverse range of speakers and combined system wide keynotes with international, national and local discussions on regionally-relevant population health opportunities, followed by interactive workshop sessions to mobilise thinking and actions.

We were also fantastically supported by Jacquie White, Director National System Transformation Group and her team from NHS England who are guiding us on our journey offering national support.

Furthermore, an excellent opportunity arose to learn from Surrey Heartlands and we were privileged to have Dr Claire Fuller, Senior Responsible officer from Surrey Heartlands Health and Care Partnership, who showed us the value of engagement and the impact of their formative Clinical Academy in Surrey.

An international perspective was given by John Lee, Executive Director from Aetna who described a variety of population health solutions and examples of implementation from around the world and Dr Justin Whatling, Vice President of Population Health from Cerner gave an fantastic international perspective and showed us the real value of integrated data.

Locally, discussions were led by Dr Mark Johnstone, NHS Rightcare delivery partner who talked about reducing the unwarranted variations in care, Dr Andy Knox, GP and Director of Population Health Morecambe Bay Integrated Care Partnership (ICP) highlighted the importance of promoting culture change and social movements and lessons leant from the Vanguards and these presentations were crucially followed by an overview of commissioning for population health presented by Andrew Harrison, Chief Finance Officer, Fylde and Wyre CCG.

Participants also had the opportunity in engage in dialogue and think critically about how to create collective impact and action moving forward in intelligence, transformation or clinical and system leadership (infrastructure).  A particular focus was placed on how to create strategic partnerships and identify stakeholders who should be engaged in working together to get traction across the system.

Watch our videos

All of the livestream videos from the event are all available on our Population Health Playlist on YouTube.

Here are the links to individual films:

Welcome and introduction to the day - Dr Sakthi Karunanithi

A whole system approach to achieving the quadruple aim – setting the scene - Dr Amanda Doyle

Surrey – progress and their local perspective - Dr Claire Fuller

An international perspective - John Lee

An international perspective - Dr Justin Whatling

A national perspective on population health – what is the national offer and how do we shape this? - Jacquie White

Unwarranted variation - Dr Mark Johnston

The local perspective – future development of workstreams - Dr Sakthi Karunanithi

Learnings from the vanguards: delivering population health management that improved population health - Dr Andy Knox

Q and A session - panel chaired by Declan Hadley

Population health for commissioning - Andrew Harrison

Feedback and commitments from the workshop sessions - chaired by Declan Hadley 

Summary and closing statement - Dr Sakthi Karunanithi 

Listen to the presentation audio

The audio files from the event are all available in our Population Health set on Soundcloud.

Here are the links to individual audio files:

Welcome and introduction to the day - Dr Sakthi Karunanithi

A whole system approach to achieving the quadruple aim – setting the scene - Dr Amanda Doyle

Surrey – progress and their local perspective - Dr Claire Fuller

An international perspective - John Lee

An international perspective - Dr Justin Whatling

A national perspective on population health – what is the national offer and how do we shape this? - Jacquie White

Unwarranted variation - Dr Mark Johnston

The local perspective – future development of workstreams - Dr Sakthi Karunanithi

Eleanor Garnett-Bentley

@gb_eleanor

Associate Director for Transformation, Innovation Agency