NPCS - Needs Provision and Complexity Scale for Long Term Neurological Conditions - KCL

[Sly Saint]

Background

King’s researchers have been working to identify those in need of specialist rehabilitation, define their individual needs and tailor their care. Their work is helping the NHS to improve the lives of patients and commission its rehabilitation services cost-effectively. As a result, thousands of patients with severe disabilities are benefitting from specialist inpatient rehabilitation closer to their home and families.

This paradigm shift in specialist rehabilitation has been made possible by nearly two decades of research from a team led by Lynne Turner-Stokes, Professor of Rehabilitation Medicine at the Cicely Saunders Institute in the Faculty of Nursing Midwifery & Palliative Care. Lynne and her team at King’s - Professor Richard Siegert, Dr Stephen Ashford and Dr Mendwas Dzingina – conduct their programme of research through widespread collaboration with clinicians and researchers in the UK and around the world.

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/spotligh...rly-to-transform-lives-and-save-the-nhs-money

The Needs and Provision Complexity Scale and its development

To support implementation of the NSF, the UK Department of Health commissioned the NHS Information Centre to develop a LTnC dataset for monitoring implementation and benchmarking performance against the NSF standards. The Needs and Provision Complexity Scale (NPCS) was developed as part of this process as a new measure, designed to measure needs for community care and rehabilitation and to assess provision against these needs.

NPCS development was initiated in 2008 by the LTnC Dataset Development Group. As well as service users and carers, the group consisted of commissioners and healthcare professionals from a range of disciplines, all of whom were experienced in care and planning of services of people with LTnC. The instrument progressed through an iterative process of testing and refinement before publication in by the NHS Information Centre in 2010. In its original form, both parts were designed for completion by clinicians. A patient-report version of the NPCS-Gets was subsequently developed and tested for completion by patients and/or their carers.

The NPCS allows a characterisation of healthcare and social support services in terms of both the type and amount needed and delivered. It also includes a costing algorithm to estimate the cost of meeting unmet needs. It may be used at individual level during integrated care planning to monitor the changing needs of a given patient over time and the services that are provided to support them at different stages along the care pathway. It may also have application at population level to identify gaps in service provision and to estimate the likely costs of addressing those gaps.

The NPCS tool:

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/cicelysaunders/resources/tools/npcs

I wondered if this scale Needs and Provision Complexity Scale could be applied to ME/CFS patients?