Social Value
KPMG helped Marie Curie transform palliative and end of life care. In doing so, we helped improve the quality of care for UK citizens and made the NHS more sustainable.
Palliative and end of life care (PEoLC) is an important and emotional topic for people across the UK. Nearly every adult has had an experience where a friend or family member has needed PEoLC services. The experience isn’t always optimal.
Patients and their carers complain of too many unexpected A&E visits, too many uncomfortable nights waiting for medications, too much stress trying to navigate the system. More often than not, and despite their wishes, most patients end up dying in hospital.
The PEoLC patient pathway isn’t just suboptimal for patients and their carers. It’s also hugely expensive for the NHS. Each year more than 650,000 out-of-hours visits are made in the UK to emergency departments by people at the end of life. Ambulance conveyancing of PEoLC patients is also extremely high. Without change, the challenge is only going to get worse with demand for palliative care projected to increase by 13% over the next 10 years.
One of the UK’s leading end of life charities, Marie Curie, scored a big win for PEoLC patients in 2022 by working with the government and allies to ensure that the new Health and Care Act 2022 would include a statutory duty for Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) to commission PEoLC services that meet the needs of their populations. They wanted to understand how the ICBs were getting on with the requirements.
KPMG knew we could help. Working pro bono, our people partnered with Marie Curie to survey the 42 ICBs and understand their challenges and opportunities related to PEoLC. The survey uncovered some important findings. Taken as a whole, they suggested that progress had been slower than hoped. Just 35% of systems said they had a good understanding of their population’s health needs. Only 3% had properly assessed the required workforce to deliver services effectively.
Yet the big takeaway from our discussions was that the ICBs needed a way to quantify the value of their programmes to better support prioritisation and investment decisions.
Challenge accepted; KPMG is great at helping organisations quantify value. Drawing on the best of our firm’s deep repository of tools and methodologies, we created a practical and flexible toolkit to help PEoLC services quantify their value and build their business case.
KPMG is also great at driving change. And we know the key to adoption is success stories. So we volunteered to work with one leading ICB to look at a range of options for how they could improve 24/7 access to essential PEoLC services. Then we helped them make an informed decision and put them on the path to executing their strategy. We demonstrated how their strategy could save them more than £100m over 20 years while vastly improving patient care.
We took Marie Curie from problem through to solution and activation. In doing so, we helped improve the quality of PEoLC care across the country
View the KPMG profile in the MCA Members Directory.