“Champion, challenge, collaborate.”
Being commissioned by the Mayor of London to produce independent reviews of proposals for major service change, affecting Londoners, perfectly aligns with our commitment to help the health and care system make better decisions and ultimately achieve benefits for population health and wellbeing.
Mending smarter, not harder: Changing fracture care for children
The report demonstrates there is significant variation between trusts in England in how paediatric fractures are managed. Widespread adoption of less interventional approaches to paediatric fracture management could result in significant savings in hospital activity, particularly reduced follow-up appointments for uncomplicated fractures.
Why can’t I prove my programme is effective?
Evaluation blog series continues with Impact Evaluation Lead Mike Woodall looking at how programme designers can maximise the chances of success.
MDSN: Community Healthcare Services
How Does Access to Community Health Services Vary Across the Midlands?
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.
Urgent Community Response – What Works?
The Strategy Unit, with our partners Ipsos, has been commissioned by NHS England and NHS Improvement (NHSEI) to provide a long-term national evaluation of the Urgent Community Response programme rolled-out across England. The programme aims to shift resources to home and community-based services as part of the NHS commitment to providing the right care, to the right people, at the right time. And there are a range of outputs from the early work that provide learning for local systems as they develop their services.
Estimating the impact of the proposed reforms to the Mental Health Act on the workload of psychiatrists
In January 2021, the Government published a White Paper, setting out its plans to reform the Mental Health Act.
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.
Inequities in children and young people’s mental health services
Good mental health during early years and childhood has a great bearing on health throughout life.
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.
Strategy Unit analysis of air quality highlights inequalities
Poor air quality is the largest environmental risk to public health in the UK and central London has the highest levels of particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide. The Guy’s and St. Thomas’ charity, now operating its programmes under the Impact on Urban Health banner, have committed to 10 years of funding to improve air quality-related health in the residents of South London boroughs of Lambeth and Southwark. The charity commissioned the Strategy Unit to explore the health of several key groups and the factors that most influence health alongside air quality within the area.
Some positive news for integrating GP practices with hospital trusts
The drive for greater integration of health and care services has been the central theme of UK health policy for most of
Equity and Cost Growth in Specialised Services
NHS specialised services provide care for people with complex or rare medical conditions.
Mental Health Surge Model
Early in the Covid pandemic, it became clear that people’s mental health would suffer. Whether through bereavement, unemployment, social isolation, not being able to access support services – or a host of other routes – an alarming picture began to emerge and attract attention.
Modelling the impact of covid on waiting lists for planned care
Working with the national collaboration to coordinate covid-related analysis, and the NHSE/I Midlands region, the Strategy Unit has produced a ‘systems dynamics’ model of waiting lists for planned care. The model is freely available for non-commercial use across the NHS. Here, Steven Wyatt and Mike Woodall explain what we did and how we did it.
How will we know if Integrated Care Systems reduce demand for urgent care?
The implications of a blended payment system are far reaching: Decisions about planned activity levels will determine the total funding envelope for urgent care within a system and will influence the behaviour of healthcare providers and the services they deliver to patients.