A study carried out by King’s College London and the Centre for Health Economics at the University of York has found that higher primary care capitation funding is linked to higher ratings across all Care Quality Commission (CQC) domains and in the overall practice rating.
The cross-sectional study pooled three years of primary care administrative data collected from 7,310 practices in England which underwent CQC inspections between November 2014 and December 2017.
Ordered logistic regression methods were used to predict the relationship between practice capitation funding and CQC ratings in each of five domains of quality: caring, effective, responsive, safe and well led, together with an overall practice rating.
Higher capitation funding per patient was significantly associated with higher CQC ratings across all five quality domains: caring (odds ratio [OR] 1.14; 95% CI 1.04-1.23), effective (OR 1.08; 95% CI 1.00-1.16), responsive (OR 1.09; 95% CI 1.02-1.17), safe (OR 1.11; 95% CI 1.05-1.18), well led (OR 1.13; 95% CI 1.06-1.20) and overall rating (OR 1.13; 95% CI 1.06-1.19).
Commenting on the findings, the authors said: “This study suggests that measured dimensions of the quality of care are related to the underlying capitation funding allocated to each general practice, implying that additional capitation funding may be associated with higher levels of primary care quality.”
The findings are published in the BMJ Open.
