The Benefits

The response to Year of Care (YOC) has been overwhelmingly positive from everyone involved, be they people with diabetes, clinicians, or managers. This is described in detail in Chapter 9 of the Report (PDF 1.3MB).

The key benefits of care planning using the YOC approach are:

• People with diabetes report improved experience of care and real changes in self care behaviour.
• Professionals report improved knowledge and skills, and greater job satisfaction.
• Practices report better organisation and team work.
• Productivity is improved: care planning is cost neutral at practice level: there are savings for some. 
• Care planning takes time to embed; changes in clinical indicators across populations may be seen after two of three care planning cycles.

The importance of these for people with long term conditions, clinicians and commissioners are summarised Chapter 2 (PDF 1.3MB)

Paul McClintock a GP who has been using this approach to care planning for 5 years describes their practice experience (FLV 66MB)

Read what people have said

Care planning what has been achieved? 

The Year of Care pilot programme demonstrated important impacts on patient and clinical experience and behaviour, practice organisation and wider influence on local health communities.

Headline achievements:

• Care planning is now the norm in a majority of practices across pilot communities (Tower Hamlets = 97%, Kirklees 83%, North Tyneside = 79% and West Northumberland 73%)
• 76% of people with Type 2 diabetes on practice registers have had at least one care planning consultation
• Care planning works across diverse population thus addressing inequalities
• The Training and Support team delivered cascade training to 1000 healthcare professionals and trained over 40 quality assured trainers.
• The core philosophy and approach is being transferred to other long term conditions in a variety of NHS settings
• The adoption of care planning stimulated wider system redesign