Health, education and social care utilisation and costs for children with additional or high needs
Dates
January 2024 - June 2026
Research Team
Professor Matt Sutton, Professor Ruth Gilbert, Christine Farquharson, Dr Shing Lau, Dr Louise McGrath-Lone, Professor Jess Deighton, Professor Johnny Downs
Background
Healthcare, education and social care services support healthy, safe development of children into adulthood. Use and costs of these services are concentrated among certain children, such as those with complex health conditions, who need to use these services much more than their peers. We call this additional or high needs. Government policy is to join up services within integrated care systems, but there is a lack of research on provision of healthcare, education, and social care services for children with additional or high needs and how much services complement each other across the child life course and how patterns of services vary across England. We also want to find out whether early investment in proactive support, such as day care or special educational needs support, might prevent later problems and be better for families.
Aims and objectives
This project aims to:
(1) count how much contacts with services cost for each child in England across from birth to age 24 across health, social care, and special educational needs. We will find out how patterns of costs vary across England and which groups of children account for most costs,
(2) identify opportunities for these sectors to collaborate and develop relationships that will support children and young people’s health and care through more joined up services and earlier intervention.
Methods
We will be using the ECHILD database - a database containing anonymous administrative data from hospital, education and social care services for all children in England. We will measure the combined costs of these services across childhood to identify which groups of children have high use and costs. Findings could indicate where more joined up services might improve outcomes for children without increasing costs. We also explore how service use and costs in the three sectors vary across the 42 integrated care systems in England, and how costs have changed among early and late adopters of integrated care systems. We will also find out if areas with higher rates of proactive services early in childhood have lower rates of emergency care at older ages.
Policy relevance & dissemination
This project will inform the development of Integrated Care Systems and Partnerships across England by generating evidence across public service sectors for children and young people. Parents and young people say that education, health and social care should be interlinked. However, they report experiences of disconnected services that parents need to spend a lot of time navigating.