Summary of main findings
The achievement of quality indicators for hypertension either did not vary with geographic deprivation, or was higher in patients from more deprived localities. There were few differences in inequalities before and after the implementation of incentives, although there was a general trend for quality to improve over time, and some indicators reached a ceiling of high achievement in all deprivation categories.
Additionally, we found that using patients' postcode-based deprivation scores gave similar results to using practices' area deprivation scores, derived from the weighted mean of relevant IMDs to the postcodes of all practice's registered patients.
Strengths and limitations of the study
This study has a number of strengths. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to assess the relationship between deprivation and non-incentivised indicators of care for hypertension. All the indicators are evidence-based and validated by independent panels including general practitioners (Table 1). Data were collected by hand searching both the electronic and paper patient records using clear criteria. Credit was given to any mention of the care even if it was not fully documented.
There was an adequate response rate of 76%, and the responders were similar with respect to age and sex to non-responders. Therefore, we think it unlikely that response bias has had a substantial affect on the results, although it is possible that there were differences in the level of deprivation between responders and non-responders. The practices in this study were broadly representative of the English national range of the socioeconomic deprivation [14]. Most of the quality indicators in this study referred to processes of the health care rather than outcomes. Process measures have the following advantages over outcome measures for assessing the quality of health care. There are many causes of changes in health status other than health care, and there are many problems in adequately adjusting outcomes for differences in case mix [17]. Processes are also more sensitive measures of quality than outcomes, and more clearly linked to any action that should be taken to improve quality [18]. Moreover, process measures are currently the basis of the Quality and Outcomes Framework and other pay for performance schemes, and therefore are clearly relevant to those schemes and this paper [19, 20].
This study assessed patient area deprivation using patient postcodes, rather than practice postcodes which have been used in previous studies [7–9]. Although using patients' postcode-based deprivation scores is a more accurate measure of deprivation than simply using the practice postcode deprivation, the patients' socioeconomic status might vary despite sharing the same postcode. Ideally further studies should evaluate the correlation of quality of care with patient's income and level of education, but this information is difficult to obtain.
Since 2004 the GP contract has been reviewed, and in 2006 the two hypertension indicators related to smoking were amalgamated with other smoking indicators onto a single smoking domain [19, 20].
Limitations include that we assessed recorded care, and it is possible that the care was delivered without being recorded. However, recording is an essential component of quality in a team-based approach to chronic disease management [21]. The study was also based on a small number of practices and patients, due to the practical constraints of collecting data manually from patient records. We categorised participants into thirds in terms of area deprivation. We set the IMD range of these subgroups to give almost equal numbers in each group rather than comparative to the national IMD range. This is because the analysis was set to evaluate the health inequalities within the sample. Only three bands of deprivation were compared. As there is a chance that the differences in quality lie in the bottom quintile, not the bottom tertile, we repeated the analysis using different break points for deprivation, with no substantial changes to the results, and so are confident that our results are not driven by the methods chosen. Nevertheless, a study which focuses on more extreme deprivation may find different results, and this would be an interesting area for further research.
We did not assess the effect of severity of disease, and all patients with hypertension who met our inclusion criteria were eligible. The ethnicity of the patients was not considered in the analysis, as 95-97% of the Norfolk population is classified as 'White British' [22].
Whilst we set out to investigate the relationship between deprivation and quality, our secondary analyses included approximately 70 other univariate analyses comparing baseline characteristics of patients with our varied quality indicators. We used a conventional p-value of < 0.05 to determine statistical significance, but could have used a p-value of p < 0.01 or less in view of the multiple statistical testing. This would have produced a less nuanced but more consistent result that deprivation had no significant effect on achievement of any of the indicators.
Comparison with existing literature
Our findings are consistent with those reported by Strong et al, who assessed quality of care in 38 general practices. They found either no association between indicator achievement and deprivation, or better care in more deprived areas [9]. Equally, 8,515 practices were assessed by Ashworth et al [8], who reported slightly lower achievement of incentivised indicators for hypertension in 2004/5 in the most deprived areas compared to the least deprived areas, with the near disappearance of this gap by 2006/7.