Expectations: The hidden driver of healthcare demand
How well do we understand changing expectations and implications for the NHS?
Strategy Unit demand model wins prestigious Florence Nightingale Award
Our open-source demand model, developed in collaboration with the New Hospital Programme, has been named the 2025 winner of the Florence Nightingale Award for Excellence in Health and Care Analytics.
Our role in the New Hospital Programme
Learn how the Strategy Unit’s innovative model is transforming hospital planning by providing a consistent, data-driven approach to forecast future demand and evidence-based decision making.
MDSN: Community Healthcare Services
How Does Access to Community Health Services Vary Across the Midlands?
What’s philosophy got to do with evidence reviews?
Ever wondered how to make better use of evidence in decision-making? Follow our latest blog series to find out more about how our Evidence and Knowledge Mobilisation team can help you to make sense of and use evidence from research and practice.
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.
How is growth in diagnostic testing affecting the hospital system?
Diagnostic services, such as medical imaging, endoscopy, and pathology, have grown substantially in recent years and at a faster rate than most other healthcare services. Increased diagnostic testing brings benefits to patients, but rapid growth of this service area within a complex, adaptive system such as the NHS is likely to have had unintended consequences. Midlands ICBs wanted to understand the impact of diagnostic growth on hospital services.
Could a peer review methodology help drive continual learning within and across local systems?
In this blog Karen describes how peer review methodologies are being used to support learning in Long COVID services.
Emergency department acuity measurement and process: quick scoping review
This review was commissioned to inform NHS England’s Acuity Standardisation Project which aims to agree a standardised method of allocating acuity category (a triage method) for Emergency Departments (EDs) and Urgent Treatment Centres (UTCs).
MDSN: Decision-making by senior leaders to support recovery from COVID
This paper summarises experiences of Integrated Care System leaders in making strategic decisions to support recovery of services from
Insight 2022 - Day 1 - ICSs working together to be intelligence-led organisations: lessons from history
ICSs working together to be intelligence-led organisations: lessons from historyHow can Integrated Care Systems (ICS
Strategy Unit devises a new method for classifying outpatient appointments
The number of outpatient attendances in England is now approaching 100 million each year.
INSIGHT 2021: A new resource to support analysis of outpatient services
In this session, Andrew Jones presented a new classification system designed to enrich analyses of outpatient activity.
INSIGHT 2021: Insight to Action. What Works?
It has been estimated that it can take up to 17 years to translate evidence into practice – how can we change that?
Less noise and more light: using criteria-driven analysis to tackle inequalities
Reducing health inequality is a long-standing aim of health policy. Yet the gap between policy aim and population outcome has grown in recent years: on most measures health inequalities have got worse.
Learning the lessons of Long Covid in real time
Round table event, 12 July
Equity and Cost Growth in Specialised Services
NHS specialised services provide care for people with complex or rare medical conditions.
Making sense of evidence
It's time to celebrate World Evidence-Based Healthcare (EBHC) Day. In a world dominated by COVID-19 and the associated infodemic, this day arguably has more resonance. Closer to home, EBHC Day also coincides with our Insight 2020 festival and the launch of the Midlands Decision Support network. What better opportunity to ask, 'what does evidence-informed decision making actually mean'?