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Things can only get better (?)
Introducing a new online tool to help local health and care service planners think differently about healthy ageing.
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‘Internal Consultancy’: INSIGHTS from evidence and experience
In this blog, our Head of Policy, Fraser Battye, shares his reflections on a recent ‘SU INSIGHTS’ event on the ‘Internal Consultancy’
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Are ‘Internal Consultancies’ a good option for the NHS?
Ahead of a SU INSIGHTS event on the topic, Fraser Battye, our Head of Policy suggests ways the NHS could make better use of consultancy support.
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From ‘right drift’ to ‘left shift’?
Our Head of Policy, Fraser Battye, looks at the challenges facing the intention to shift care ‘from hospital to community’. He suggests that we have missed a critical part of the explanation for why this ‘left shift’ hasn’t taken place following previous initiatives.
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Ara Darzi, Wes Streeting and English health policy. Part 2: cutting the knot
Following on from part one, Fraser continues exploring the Gordian Knot of English health policy.
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Ara Darzi, Wes Streeting and English health policy. Part 1: the Gordian Knot
Health policy is not at a crossroads, it is in a bind. Strands so entangled, so complex they resemble a Gordian knot. Can this knot be untied?
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The risks of risk stratification
Medical history is full of bizarre and gruesome procedures.
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Want to ease pressure in urgent care? Simply cut community services!?!
What should decision makers do with analysis that challenges deeply held assumptions? In this blog, Fraser Battye reflects on a surprising recent finding about community services.
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Outcome-based commissioning: can we rescue promise from the rubble of hype?
The first effect of policy is on expectations. In every case I can think of, the effect is inflationary.
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Playing our part in conversations about death
“Dad, why are all your ‘peptalks’ about death?” Children can be a source of fundamental insight. They seem to specialise in feedback of the unvarnished, unmediated and fully caffeinated variety. The kind of feedback that cuts straight to it. My youngest daughter, mid-way through our sunny walk down the hill to school, pressed on: “And you wear black all the time. You look like a crow…” Fundamental insight, and now fashion advice. This was quite the school run.
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Need, demand, and supply of GP services: an old lens on an ever-present problem
About 20 years ago, I attended a lecture given by Andrew Stevens, a rather formidable and austere Professor of Public Health at the Un
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Ghosted by an old friend
“…personal contact was a vital element in general practice from the beginning. By 1959 50% of people in England regarded their GP as a personal friend.”
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Part-time GPs and the decline in continuity of care: a cause or a symptom?
In our recent paper we explore why levels of care continuity have been declining and what might be done to turn things around.
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Two sides of the same coin
Hospital demand arising from GPs not seeing patients, is eating into the resources that they would use to manage down the elective backlog. In turn, this is creating more demand for GPs.
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Are GP consultation rates rising or falling? Who or what should we believe?
If the "data suggests" GP appointments are substantially higher than pre-pandemic, then what is behind patients reporting recieving fewer appointments?
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GP services: new analysis and fresh insights
In our latest analysis for the Midlands Decision Support Network (MDSN), we explore the long standing problem of access to GP practice consultations we consider the implications, and explore potential solutions.
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A collaborative partnership with the Health Foundation
The Strategy Unit is collaborating with the Health Foundation to help address key health and social care issues by combining our expertise in data analysis.
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How data makes things worse
All light brings shade. My list of ‘changes that have been all upside and no downside’ is short and debatable.
Blog post Better use of analysis | Learning and development
Diagnosing harms?
All medicines are poisons. Everything that cures could kill if administered in the wrong doses, to the wrong people, at the wrong times, in the wrong ways.