Preventative vs reactive care vs proactive care – What’s the difference?
Both preventative and reactive strategies in health and social care offers the market alternative ways to manage different health and social care needs across a community. What makes it different is their approach and their timing of when interventions are delivered to manage these needs.
What is preventative care?
Preventative care aims to avoid or reduce the occurrence of health problems and illnesses before they develop or cause more critical situations to take place. Preventative care is often argued to be a core approach within the shift to proactive care as it offers the opportunity to address symptoms before they are present, to help individuals maintain good health and prevent diseases.
Examples of preventative care in health and social care
- Routine check-ups
- Vaccinations
- Health screenings e.g. diabetic review, breast screening
- Healthy lifestyle promotion
What is reactive care?
Reactive care however, focuses on addressing health issues and medical conditions after they have already occurred. Reactive care tends to be delivered when there are specific symptoms, diseases, or emergencies present.
Examples of reactive care in health and social care
- Treating injuries
- Managing chronic conditions
- Surgery
What is proactive care?
Proactive care, used interchangeably with anticipatory care, involves identifying and addressing potential health issues before they become severe or symptomatic. To do this proactive care is delivered early on by focusing on early detection and interventions to prevent or migrate the progression of health problems.
Examples of facilitators of proactive care in health and social care
- Remote care monitoring
- Person-centred care plans
- Regular health assessments
- Increased use of technology-enabled care
All types of care are essential across the health and social care continuum to ensure individuals receive timely and appropriate attention for their health needs. The shift towards more proactive care aims to strike a balance between preventing illnesses and efficiently managing existing health conditions to improve overall health outcomes, reduce health and social care costs, promote independence, and promote the importance of improving overall wellbeing .
Through making the shift to proactive care, care providers can also draw upon a system which is outcomes-focused to create a more sustainable and effective social care market, despite the challenges we are currently faced with.
By following a proactive care approach social care providers can embed a new and more effective social contract involving the provider, the individual, and their families to co-produce better joined up care packages which overcome the challenges facing the social care market more effectively, to help ensure demands are met but equally avoid staff burnout and low retention rates.
Preventative vs reactive vs proactive care – why are they important?
Both proactive and reactive strategies in health and social care are important because when used in unison they complement each other to provide a more comprehensive health and social care service to deliver a better continuity of care.
With both proactive and preventative care focusing on prevention and early intervention and reactive care focusing on addressing immediate health issues, finding a balance between them is vital to lead a more efficient and effective health and social care sector which prioritises both prevention and timely treatment.
In the Care Act 2014, prevention in social care was highlighted as one of the seven key responsibilities for local authorities. Prevention in the Care Act explains how both commissioners and practitioners need to have a shared understanding on how best to prevent future care needs, as well as understand the benefits different approaches and opportunities to prevent, reduce, or delay needs for different groups with various care needs.
To do this, it is essential that commissioners proactively understand the local needs of their community and use a strengths-based approach to consider when a person’s needs could be prevented, reduced, or delayed.
Prevention and early intervention in health and social care is important therefore as it proactively promotes independence and wellbeing allowing commissioners to use a co-production approach to get the best outcomes possible, whilst encouraging individuals to retain their skills and confidence in preventing future care needs, or delaying further deterioration of their care needs when possible.
Equally without having reactive care plans in place, your community is at risk of individuals experiencing emergencies or unpreventable health issues at a poorer quality of care. This could easily put more pressure on emergency services when they are already stretched as well as create longer waiting times for hospital beds, spaces in residential homes as well as discharge delays too.
When you compare the different care approaches, there is a stronger emphasis and need for proactive care rather than reactive to focus on individual’s chosen goals or outcomes.
The shift to proactive care is important therefore as it reduces the reliance on the NHS, particularly emergency services, hospitals and GPs, as well as social care providers to help reduce waiting times and discharge delays, as well as the dependency on care homes when they are already stretched. Here the use resources and budgets can be commissioned more strategically without overspending, staff burnout can be prevented, and most importantly health outcomes can be improved by promoting independence.
What is a proactive care plan?
A proactive care plan is a document to help health and social care professionals deliver the best quality of care possible which is catered to every individual’s care needs. Proactive care planning ensures clinical teams and social care providers have a clear plan on what matters to the individual to ensure both preferences from them and their families are considered and delivered as much as possible.
A proactive enhanced advance care plan (PEACE) is a non-mandatory document to help health care professionals to deliver the best possible care to individuals who are at the latter stages of their life. Within the plan it can be decided where their last stages of care will be delivered for example at home, in a care home, a hospice, or a hospital setting. This helps to identify needs now and for the needs yet to be catered for, whilst taking into account the individual’s and their family’s needs.
Proactive care plans and proactive enhanced advance care plans are extremely important for dementia patients as advanced care planning in dementia offers a continuous and dynamic process of early reflection and conversations between the dementia patient, health and social care professionals, social care providers, and their loved ones. It helps to have conversations and decide about future treatment and care, including end-of-life care, to find the best approach for them.
Proactive care for dementia patients is crucial therefore as it offers the opportunity for more improved disease management, provide better support for patients and caregivers, lead to better health outcomes, enhance quality of life, and offer a more sustainable approach for individuals living with dementia. It also allows care providers to have the support needed ready in place for when care needs change so these plans can fall into place to avoid disruption and make transitions as smooth as possible.
Preventive vs Proactive vs reactive care – What are the advantages and disadvantages of each?
As discussed above there are many reasons why each care approach is important for health and social care. The main reason for this is because there are many different benefits of preventative, reactive, and proactive care. Equally all three can offer a variety of disadvantages too if the approach is not followed correctly.
Below is a table which compares both the advantages and disadvantages of preventative, reactive and proactive care.
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Preventative Care |
Reactive Care |
Proactive Care |
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Advantages |
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Disadvantages |
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The table above demonstrates that there are a number of advantages and disadvantages of preventative, reactive, and proactive care. Preventative care plays a crucial role in promoting overall health, preventing diseases, and reducing the burden on both healthcare and social care systems, despite the disadvantages that can occur.
Equally, proactive care offers significant benefits in early detection, disease prevention, and improved health outcomes. However, it may require more substantial resources compared to other care approaches. Reactive care on the other hand, plays an essential role in addressing immediate health needs, managing chronic conditions, and providing advanced medical interventions. However, it can be costly if it is the only approach which is relied upon and can put your community at a higher risk of missed opportunities to focus on prevention which could reduce the reactive care demand in the future.
Ideally what works best is when preventative, proactive and reactive care planning is used simultaneously to all complement each other by ensuring both immediate health concerns and preventative measures are effectively addressed to achieve a better overall population health and wellbeing of your community.
When preventative, proactive and reactive care are used simultaneously it offers a huge variety of benefits to ensure no needs are left unmet. Some of these benefits include:
- Offering the opportunity to have a better population health management where no individual is left with their needs unmet
- Better early detection and prevention of illness and diseases
- Better health and mental health outcomes
- Better use of resources when budgets are stretched
- Cost savings
- Better focus on health promotion including mental health promotion
- Quicker and more efficient responsiveness to immediate needs and emergencies
- Better tailored person-centred care
- Reduced burdens on the NHS and reduced dependency on care homes
What are the challenges when delivering the best preventative, proactive and reactive care?
Delivering preventative, proactive, and reactive care to get the best outcomes offers a number of different challenges. The table below demonstrates the different challenges local authorities, health and social care professionals, and patients themselves can face when preventative, proactive and reactive care is being delivered.
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Preventative Care |
Proactive Care |
Reactive Care |
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Challenges |
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The table above demonstrates that there can be a variety of challenges that can impact the efficiency of delivering preventative, proactive, or reactive care.
The main challenges of reactive care are if you solely deliver reactive care, you are putting your community, GPs, care providers, care homes, and hospitals at a higher risk of being overwhelmed and at a higher risk of receiving avoidable hospital admissions.
One of the biggest challenges for both proactive and preventative care approaches is that in order to have early detections and interventions your local authority will need to have access to more valuable data and information to make more data-led decisions. To do that, like most digital transformation journeys, there can be multiple challenges. Some of these include:
- Getting everyone involved onboard to collaborate and spend time to learn how to use new solutions and processes
- Being able to fully understand the data and security risks of the new solutions and how they can be avoided
- Being able to understand all the health and social care needs of the community including the different socio-economic backgrounds and how that can impact someone’s health and mental wellbeing
In order to make the shift from reactive to proactive care, more advanced data analysis is needed. For this to happen local authorities will need to invest in more digital solutions to best support their needs. Through doing this you can help your local authority and your care providers have a better understanding of your population. This will help your understanding of not just the healthcare needs but also understand the wider social determinants of health which could be impacting the mental health and wellbeing of your community too. Having this understanding will allow your local community to have the best population health management and be able cater to every individual need so no care need is left unmet.
Overcoming the challenges when shifting from reactive to proactive care – How can The Access Group help?
In order to overcome the challenges when shifting from reactive to proactive care it’s vital that your local authority and care providers makes the shift from paper and manual processes to digital ones. This will provide the opportunity to have access to more sophisticated data insights and make better data-led decisions to improve the quality of care your community commissions and delivers.
ADASS’ vision for social care states that all care providers and local authorities should be shifting their approach to delivering care so the right care, at the right place and time can be delivered at the right cost. To do this they have stated that care providers must draw unpon a system which is:
- Focused on outcomes and wellbeing
- Proactive and preventative
- Personalised, co-created, and flexible
- Accessible and affordable
- Sustainable, efficient, and effective
- Fair in what it asks of people
- Integrated and coordinated
- Local community based
Through ensuring your care delivery focuses on all these things you can help overcome the pressures facing the social care market and allow the opportunity for better joined-up care packages to be commissioned and delivered.
Below is a list of the top 5 things to consider when making the shift from reactive to proactive care to ensure you are encompassing ADASS’ vision for care so better access to services can be achieved for every individual who needs it.
1. Data Collection
One of the most important things to consider is how best your local authority and care providers can collect the relevant data needed to offer early intervention and detection of future health and social care needs.
Without being able to address the whole population’s health in your local community you will not be able to identify the most frequent needs and the least frequent needs to ensure all the support available can reach the demand needed.
To be able to detect future health needs before they have taken place, you will need to develop models to forecast health issues so you can be best prepared for future demand and intervene earlier before more reactive care is needed.
Our Access PAMMS Suite offers this functionality by offering a variety of modules which can help manage demand more efficiently and monitor risks to prevent your local authority going over budget but still be able to deliver the best quality care.
Our Demand Modelling module for example, combines both statistical forecasting techniques with artificial intelligence to analyse long-term historical activity to help identify future trends and patterns with up to 99% accuracy. Not only can our demand modelling help you deliver proactive care, it can also help you find the balance between both reactive and proactive care by helping your local authority better understand the health and social care market to manage unexpected events better.
Equally, Access Assure offers several different ways to collect data relevant to an individual's needs so that their care can remain personlaised. To make this as streamlined as possible we have ensured our digital telecare ecosystem is interoperable with other telecare devices so your care providers can access all the data they need to be proactive with care plans in one place.
Digitally transforming the way your care providers plan, commission, and deliver care can be challenge. For many, investing in telecare can take a lot of time and with the analogue to digital telecare switchover looming nearer some care providers may feel it is easier to avoid using it altogether due to fears it will take too long to implement.
At Access Assure we do not want this to be a concern for your local community. We can support the transformation of traditional telecare methods by using 4G and Wi-Fi where available so carers can still receive real-time data to remain proactive and make better outcomes-focused decisions even when the traditional analogue system is shut down.
2. Analytics
Once you have established how you will collect the data you need, the next important thing to consider is how you will use the data to get the best outcomes.
In order to know which solution is best you need to evaluate and establish what you want to achieve from the data you are collecting.
At The Access Group we offer solutions which offer sophisticated analytics to offer more advanced data insights to help prolong future care needs as well as promote independence.
Our Social Care Landscape uses sophisticated analytics and insight tools to bring together a wide range of datasets to help monitor risks, contract management, and offer flexible reports to provide your local authority all there is to know about population and demand, spend and activity, capacity and availability, and quality and risk.
Equally, our technology-enabled care offers an advanced data aggregation platform bringing together data from multiple sources including sensors, wearables, and care and environmental data all in one place to provide more sophisticated insights to enable more informed actions and care decisions.
Through combining both reactive alarms and digital monitoring functionality our Access Assure solution offers local authorities, care providers, end-users, and their families, one-click reporting to help reduce the time spent analysing data and allow more time to be given to act through personalised reports.
We know it’s important all care is person-centred so we have ensured our data views are customisable so loved ones and carers can focus on what matters most to the individual to help prolong independence and prevent and delay future care needs.
3. Continuous Monitoring
Something else which is important to consider ensuring is that your local authority and its care providers deliver the best proactive care possible through promoting independence.
Like already discussed above our Access Assure offering provides a great digital telecare solution which goes one step further than traditional alarm systems. Through unobtrusively monitoring day-to-day routines our technology-enabled care can learn individuals day-to-day routines in a matter of 14 days. This helps to allow individuals to remain living independently in their own homes with the confidence that support will be there when they need it.
Through allowing users to set up smart alerts, carers and caregivers can be notified of any change in behaviour to help provide end-users the support they need before something more critical happens.
4. Effective care planning
Another way to help deliver better proactive care is through having effective care planning software. Through having more effective care planning you can record all care visit information reliably, accurately, and discretely. This ensures every aspect of the care visit can be recorded to ensure it has been completed properly and on time to prevent anyone waiting for the care the need.
At the Access Group we know that the best at home proactive care is delivered when all individuals involved in providing the care have access to up-to-date information in real-time. We want to make that easier for carers by integrating our electronic call monitoring system with other Access Care applications including care rostering, care planning, care compliance and our CM solution.
Through these integrations carers can have all the information on visits, client’s’ records and changes to visits due to emergencies all in one place. This provides a better holistic view of each visit to quickly and easily evaluate how visits can be improved and adapt care plans efficiently as needs change with full confidence carers will be updated straight away.
Through offering one sign in across our Access Workspace for Care your local authority can respond to events faster and make more informed decisions from using a range of intuitive dashboards and reports.
5. Collaboration
Like discussed previously in this article, another way to deliver the highest quality proactive care is through collaborating and co-producing proactive care plans that not just help the individual, but their families, carers, and the local community themselves.
One of the best ways this can be done all at the same time is through educating people about the value of living a healthy lifestyle.
Through promoting healthier lifestyles and encouraging individuals to be more proactive when managing their health and wellbeing, individuals can delay future care needs and well as prolong their independence.
An example of how this can be done through working collaboratively with multiple organisations is through embedding social prescribing within your local community.
The benefits and impacts of social prescribing can be huge. Through working with other organisations including VCFSE organsiations, your local community can learn quickly what wider social determinants of health are impacting your community to help ensure the right support is available.
At Access Elemental Social Prescribing we know social prescribing works and know it works even better when organsiations work together to promote healthier lifestyles, and the importance of looking after both your mental and physical health to prolong independence and delay future care needs.
Preventative Vs Reactive Care – Reviewing the importance of shifting to proactive care
This article has compared the differences between preventative, reactive and proactive care and why they are important. Through comparing their differences this article has highlighted how all of these care approaches work better when they are used simultaneously as they complement each other to improve outcomes further.
I have addressed the importance of using strength-based approaches when shifting from reactive to proactive care and how even though they all have disadvantages when the challenges of implementing proactive and preventative care are acknowledged and overcome, it can help deliver better outcomes in the future for individuals, their families, and local authorities by promoting the importance of staying independent, reducing dependency on GPs and hospitals when they are already so stretched, provide reassurance, and delay future care needs.
This article has also highlighted the best ways to shift from the reactive care model to the proactive care model and the impacts that can have on the community when it is implemented correctly. The article has explained how investing in a variety of digital solutions, particularly next gen digital telecare can help make digitally transforming processes easier when shifting to proactive care.
At The Access Group we offer a variety of Local Government Software and care management software for social care providers to help you deliver the best quality proactive and reactive care possible.
Contact us today and find out how we can help you deliver both reactive and proactive care which complements each other and helps overcome the issues currently facing the health and social care market to improve outcomes both now and in the future.