Figure 4. Difference in the cost of service contact for the whole cohort (n=116) between period A and period B
5.4
Distribution of service contact across the cohort
Table 3 shows that for each indicator, during the first 12 months of VOICES support, some customers reduced their use of services, some were unchanged and some customers increased service contact.
For contact with the criminal justice system
a higher proportion of customers
reduced contact
For contact with the criminal justice system, a higher proportion of customers reduced contact (31-37% of the 116) than increased contact (23-25% of 116) across all services. Conversely, for health service contact, the pattern was reversed: A&E episodes increased in 41% of customers and reduced in 28%; inpatient episodes increased in 36% of customers and reduced in 18%. Given the overall reductions for both outcomes observed in Figure 1, these data
suggest that a small number of customers with extremely frequent contact had reduced their use of services, leading to a reduction in episodes, despite more customers engaging with health care. This raises two points. Firstly, this should not be considered as a means of reducing attendances and associated costs of hospital inpatients, but secondly, this increase might reflect a positive change toward someone taking better taking care of hitherto neglected health problems.
across all services
13
