Question
How many patients go to each HIV clinic in London and what are their budgets?
26 April 2007. Related: All topics, Living with HIV long-term.
Where can I find out the number of patients registered at each HIV clinic in London, and their total financial budget for the year?
Answer
I’m not sure whether this is published or not.
Individual clinics will be able to give you a rough number for the patient that they see.
Otherwise, the data is collected by the Pan London HIV Commissioning Consortium, who may be able to help you with patient numbers, but are very unlikely to want to talk about individual budgets.
I sit on one of these sub-groups, but the budgetary information is confidential to that group.
You could also try contacting the HIV Programme Director of the London Specialised Commissioning Group (or the London Consortium) and I will send you these contact details in a separate email.
Hi,
Hope you will find the information useful. All the best!
Hello
As a fresh http://www.i-base.info user
Hi Anon, I also think it would be useful if this kind of information was public, and this may (or may not) happen in the future.
I’m not sure if it would help much in deciding how to pick a new clinic as the figures only tell part of the story. Similar changes to those taking place at your clinic are likely to be occurring at other London clinics, for the same reasons. The London Commissioners are also working to achieve similar standards of care at all London hospitals, although this isn’t an audited process yet.
The services that you need from your clinic depends on many things, including whether you are on or off treatment, whether the treatment is stable and working, and whether you are having side effects etc.
For many people off treatment – routine monitoring just needs to be an easy process, and for those on stable treatment. When it is more complicated, you need to have a good relationship with a good doctor – and this can be very individual process at every clinic.
One thing that is important, for example, is seeing the same doctor routinely.
If you are at a larger clinic then you also have the choice to change doctors.
If everything is generally going well, then changing clinics may not have any advantage. You can visit different clinics that are close to you before making any change. If you decide to change, make sure that a copy of your full notes goes to the new clinic.
Please give us a call on the treatment phoneline if you’d like to talk about this in more detail.
Thanks for your answers.
I assume this information is not widely available to HIV patients (I’ve done several internet searches and come up empty). Considering the clinics are publicly funded entities, I would have expected more transparency.
The reason for my questions, is that since becoming a patient at one clinic 2 years ago, I have seen significant reduction in services due to budgetary issues, (particularly as it relates to reduction in operating hours). I am considering moving to another clinic, but I have minimal information with which to compare the clinics, (other than location and operating hours).
It would be nice to know how much each clinic spends per patient, to know how viable the services are, to prevent me from moving from less green grass to a brown field.
It would be really nice to know how well each clinic performs, but I realise that is a tall order and may not be necessarily information that the clinics want out there.