This site is intended for UK healthcare professionals
Medscape UK Univadis Logo
Medscape UK Univadis Logo
News

Lay health worker could address primary care crisis, study suggests

Introducing a workforce of community-based lay health workers in the NHS could address current general practitioners (GP) workload demands, while improving clinical outcomes, according to research published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.

In the 1960s, programmes in the US funded members of the community provide a bridge between patients and health care providers. By facilitating appointment-keeping and increasing medication compliance, community health workers improved access to and quality of health care, while reducing costs.

In Brazil, community health workers receive basic training in disease identification and monitoring, immunisation, screening and health promotion. They support patients with medication adherence and chronic disease monitoring and liaise proactively with GPs and practice nurses.

While NHS lay health trainers support patients with smoking cessation, breastfeeding, physical activity and weight loss, the focus on single health issues and a lack of integration with primary care services leads to missed opportunities and duplication, according to the authors of this new study.

The study used the Brazilian model to estimate the costs and benefits of a similar system in England.

The authors suggest 110,585 community workers would be needed for England, costing £2.22 billion annually. Assuming that each worker engages with and successfully refer to 20% of unscreened or unimmunised individuals, an additional 753,592 cervical cancer, 365,166 breast cancer and 482,924 bowel cancer screenings could be expected. An addition of 16,398 children could receive measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccination at 12 months, with an extra 24,716 receiving MMR at 5 years of age. Each worker would support approximately 29 patients with asthma, 9 patients with COPD, 4 with dementia, 34 with diabetes and 69 with hypertension.

The authors conclude that systematic integration of community health workers at scale in the NHS could be an effective and a rapidly implementable approach to the current primary care workload crisis.


References


YOU MAY ALSO LIKE