Impact of a national primary care pay-for-performance scheme on ambulatory care sensitive hospital admissions: a small-area analysis in England.

Spatial analysis based on routinely collected data can be used to identify areas with high rates of potentially avoidable hospital admissions, providing valuable information for targeting resources and evaluating public health interventions. Our findings suggest that the QOF had a very small effect on reducing avoidable hospitalisation for incentivised conditions. Material deprivation and urbanicity were the strongest predictors of the variation in ACSC rates for all QOF incentivised conditions across England.