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?
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.
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
Socio-economic inequalities in coronary heart disease
There are substantial differences in mortality rates from cardiovascular disease between socio-economic groups. Our new tool provides an overview, for ICBs, of the points on the care pathway where inequalities emerge and are amplified
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.
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.
Socio-economic inequalities in access to planned hospital care: causes and consequences
Tacking inequalities in health is a long-standing NHS policy objective. Variation in the experiences and outcomes of different communities during the COVID-19 pandemic served to bring this issue back into focus.
Equity and Cost Growth in Specialised Services
NHS specialised services provide care for people with complex or rare medical conditions.
Accessibility of perinatal mental health services for women from Ethnic Minority groups
Barriers to accessing mental health care during pregnancy and the first postnatal year (perinatal period) seem to be greater for ethnic minority women.
Key opportunities for eye health and well being
Eye health and sight loss services have historically had a lower profile in service provision compared to many other specialities. There is a view that the importance of eye health has been underrepresented in many Sustainability and Transformation Partnership (STP) plans.
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.
Measuring what matters in systems – A call for person-centred intelligence
The Strategy Unit and Ipsos MORI launch guide to implementing Person-Centred Intelligence.
Innovation and evaluation – a proposition for change, an offer of support
Health and care services in England are labouring under a chronic state of stress – where for many organisations, ‘just about coping’ has become the new normal.