Health and social care services across England are facing increasing demand pressure, through a growing and aging population, and due to improving medical services, people are living longer with chronic conditions. It is crucial that we understand how demand for the health system is growing, how the prevalence and incidence of long-term conditions are changing, and how they are likely to change in the future. This will ultimately provide evidence and analysis that will help policymakers and system leaders improve the quality of strategic decisions across the health and social care system.
The focus of this work is on the chronic conditions component of health care demand pressures. The aim of this work is to identify mutually exclusive groups of chronic conditions and comorbidities and to analyse the prevalence and incidence of these over time. This will feed into further work, detailed in a separate protocol, that will look at how the costs and treatments associated with chronic conditions are changing.
Exploiting CPRD data allows for a more complete picture and detailed understanding of chronic conditions, and their prevalence and incidence over time.
Our aim is to use CPRD to select patients with no, one or multiple chronic conditions as diagnosed in primary care. Once we have selected patients with these conditions, we will analyse trends in their incidence and prevalence over time.
Our research on chronic conditions will consist of two major areas of work:
1. Categorisation of primary care patients with mutually exclusive chronic conditions and comorbidities. This will draw on existing research that identifies long term conditions using CPRD data
2. Time series analysis on trends of incidence and prevalence of those chronic conditions
Findings from this categorisation and trend analysis will feed into a microsimulation model, or a more standard deterministic projection model, of health care demand and costs which will be outlined in a separate protocol.
Prevalence and incidence of chronic conditions and combinations of chronic conditions over time. The selected chronic conditions are: heart failure; stroke/transient ischaemic attack; atrial fibrillation; coronary heart disease; diabetes; COPD; hypertension; cancer; asthma; dementia; anxiety; depression; schizophrenia/bipolar disorder; chronic kidney disease; chronic liver disease.
Toby Watt - Chief Investigator - The Health Foundation
Andrew Campbell - Corresponding Applicant - The Health Foundation
Ann Raymond - Collaborator - The Health Foundation
Laurie Rachet-Jacquet - Collaborator - The Health Foundation
Stephen Rocks - Collaborator - The Health Foundation
Roseanna Hamilton - Corresponding Applicant - The Health Foundation
Zoe Firth - Collaborator - The Health Foundation