This case study was submitted by Dr Ben Bray, RCP Stroke Programme Research Director
 

Understanding financial costs is an essential part of managing and improving healthcare. Certainly anyone working in the NHS at the moment can’t escape the focus on finances, but making care more cost effective has for a long time been part of the “Triple Aim” of healthcare quality. Getting good quality data about the financial costs of illness is hard, cost effectiveness studies are usually done as part of health technology appraisals rather than to support quality improvement and there is often very little data available about the social care costs of illness.
 

This year SSNAP has become one of the first national clinical audits in the world to integrate health economics into its regular reports. This is based on a project funded by NHS England that used data from SSNAP and the South London Stroke Register to estimate how much stroke costs health and social care services in the first five years after someone has a stroke. We think that there are lots of ways that this data will be useful: teams will, for example, be able to use the data from SSNAP to put cost data into business plans and work out the potential costs and benefits of improving thrombolysis services and access to early supported discharge.
 

You can watch a video where Dr Bray discusses the findings and impact of this project using this link https://vimeo.com/187350838

Download the full Case Study