Europe UK (Commonwealth Union) – Experts have drawn attentions to a performance-based incentive known as the Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) in the UK which has faced certain fallbacks in Scotland.
The National Health Service (NHS) Quality and QOF is a pay-for-performance scheme that was introduced in the United Kingdom in 2004. It is a voluntary scheme that incentivizes general practitioners (GPs) to provide high-quality care to their patients. The QOF covers a wide range of clinical and organizational indicators, and GPs receive financial rewards for meeting or exceeding certain targets.
Experts have indicated that further work is required to gain more knowledge on what occurs when pay for performance is taken away.
The withdrawal of performance-based payments for Scottish NHS GPs was linked to a reduction in quality in certain areas of care when contrasted with England where the scheme continued, according to a study that recently appeared in The BMJ.
Researchers stated that more research is required to further know the complete effect of the withdrawal as well as the accompanying refocusing of quality improvement resources.
The QOF is designed to improve the quality of care provided by GPs in the UK. It provides a framework for assessing the quality of care that is provided to patients, and it incentivizes GPs to improve the care that they provide. The QOF is based on a set of indicators that cover a wide range of clinical and organizational areas. These indicators are grouped into different domains, such as clinical areas, patient experience, and organizational issues.
Scotland scrapped the QOF in 2016 to lower the bureaucratic hurdles on GPs and to allow more time for patients, but continued with performance data gathering for certain QOF indicators for the next 3 years. This gave researchers the ability to utilize this data to gain a better understanding of the impact of scrapping the QOF for the quality of care in Scotland when contrasted with England in the same period.
