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Conclusions
The unmet needs pilots covered a wide range of healthcare services and populations, utilising a variety of methods to engage with potential clients and adopting a range of monitoring and evaluation methods. However, despite these differences, it has been possible to identify a number of shared characteristics among the pilots that appear to play a crucial role in their success in improving access to NHS services in deprived areas.
Applying the service characteristics of proximity, responsiveness, convenience, timing and continuity, identified as the "PRaCTiCe" acronym, by the Social Dimensions of Health Institute as part of the Tayside cross project evaluation, to all the unmet needs pilot projects has highlighted the important of these service characteristics.
This, in turn, has enabled the production of the recommendations for planners and service providers described in the previous section.
As has been highlighted, many of unmet needs pilot projects provide concrete examples of how the direct application of the guidelines has facilitated the successful implementation of a service and subsequent uptake. In some cases, where a service was less successfully implemented or uptake did not meet its specified targets, the reasons given often refer to the failure to implement a guideline, thereby further highlighting their importance.
The recommendations will, of course, require testing and evaluation and, as a result, may be subject to further refinement. Therefore some caution should be employed before using them uncritically. However the evidence presented in the unmet needs pilot projects suggests that they do provide a promising framework which should be taken account of in the planning and implementation of future interventions for populations with unmet healthcare needs. Future designers of a range of healthcare services may therefore benefit from drawing on this work, in order to enable the targeted populations to make use of and gain benefit from the full range of services available.
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