The great QOF (Quality and Outcomes Framework) fiasco - UK

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QOF Fiasco 2: ’Immoral’ refusal to learn from mistakes
By Jerome Burne
Last week I wrote about the great QOF (Quality and Outcomes Framework) fiasco – the 30-billion-pound public health experiment involving the whole UK population without any kind of testing or pilot programs and without telling patients (in any formal sense) what was going on. Ten years after its launch it was clear that it had almost totally failed. Yet almost no one outside the profession knew about it.

Given its potential impact on our health, this seemed a major scandal that warranted rapid action and proper investigation. This week’s post is about the medical establishment’s remarkable ability to ignore the implications and refusal to do anything about it at all. This failure to even attempt to learn any lessons from it has been described by one professor of public health as a ‘frankly immoral way to conduct policy.’

The policy wasn’t specifically kept secret but the key part of the program – paying GPs for testing for certain health biomarkers and then for prescribing various drugs if they fell above or below them – came as shocking or surprising news to those who did accidently learn about it. That accounted for half the cost, the other half went to pay for the increase in drug prescriptions."

"The kicker was that when this vastly expensive and untested project was studied to see if it had delivered bangs for the mountain of bucks – drop in chronic diseases, drop in hospital admissions and as many as 30,000 lives saved (statistically literate readers will know you don’t actually save lives, you increase time till death), the report in the Lancet found there was virtually no benefit."

http://healthinsightuk.org/2018/05/28/qof-fiasco-2-immoral-refusal-to-learn-from-mistakes/

 

Interesting. I read this one too: http://healthinsightuk.org/2018/05/...eriment-ever-and-how-its-failure-was-ignored/ (the first one)