This workstream took a pluralist approach, it combined several different modelling methodologies in order to develop an integrated suite of models that captured the interactions amongst the major components of the health and social care systems from a complex systems perspective.
Previously, models have been developed for various sub-components of this system, but they have never been fully and holistically related to one another in a way that allows the complexity of the interconnections between them, and the resultant feedback effects and emergent behaviour, to be successfully captured.
How was this achieved?
- Our modelling was informed by empirical work and by input from expert stakeholders.
- Rather than building a single, maximally realistic “mega model” of UK social and health care, we were committed to building and exploring a family of inter-related models on multiple scales and levels of resolution.
- Some models dealt with a specific interaction between two components of the Care Life Cycle, while others addressed crosscutting themes that were implicated across the Care Life Cycle (see diagram).
- Research into these cross-cutting themes was important in its own right, but it also ensured that our modelling activities were integrated, mutually informed and consistent.
- Fledgling models were compared, contrasted, discarded or revised, and were ultimately integrated together. Tensions between the findings from different models drove insights into the target systems and informed further model development.
- One primary contribution was in the area of model integration: how could complexity science modelling techniques (e.g., agent-based models, cellular automata, etc.) best be related to and integrated with each other and with results from empirical work, traditional statistical models, and more established modelling techniques such as game theory.
Rather than attempting to build a single grand model, we instead adopted a multi-scale, multi-paradigm approach to capturing the nature of the interactions between the processes and systems involved, driven by empirical findings and worked towards a suite of mutually consistent and informing models that had real policy impact.