
Virtual wards: Patient and unpaid carer experiences of ‘hospital at home’ care
Our evaluation of patient and carer experiences of virtual wards found widespread benefits and highlights areas for improvements parti

Scoping a Health Needs Assessment for Adults on Probation in England
This scoping report explores the health inequalities experienced by people on probation and the limited data on their health needs and engagement with health services. It sets out recommendations for commissioning and delivering a national health needs assessment to address that data gap and support local health needs assessments for the probation population.

MDSN: Community Healthcare Services
How Does Access to Community Health Services Vary Across the Midlands?

MDSN: AI tools for evidence synthesis
With the advancing sophistication of AI and automation-based tools, we explore their use for evidence synthesis.

Review of Ophthalmic Managed Clinical Networks (MCNs) in Staffordshire and Shropshire
The aim of the MCNs is to bring together primary care optometrists with local ophthalmologists within a geographical area. This is a review Strategy Unit were commissioned by NHS England to work with a medical retina MCN in Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin and a glaucoma MCN in Staffordshire and Stoke on Trent, to review their work so far and look at the opportunities the networks present.

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.

No more suffering in silence, we want to talk about the menopause
To mark International Women’s Day on March 8, Karen Bradley, Principal Consultant at the Strategy Unit, and Susan Blakey, Senior People Consultant at MLCSU, two advisors involved in the recent project, ‘Menopause and the NHS Workforce’, discuss its significance and share what they want to see happen as a result of the published report.

‘Developing your ICS Intelligence Functions’: A Free Webinar Series
What is an ‘Intelligence Function’? What value can they add to decision making? How can they be configured and who needs to be involved? What lessons can be drawn from current practice?

Autism evidence scan identifies knowledge gaps
Diagnosing autism takes account of a person’s differences in social interaction and communication, sensory sensitivity, interests and behaviours. Yet autism varies hugely from person to person, both in how it looks and how it is experienced.

We don’t just need to hear ‘you are more affected’ - what’s the action?
The experience of minority ethnic people symptomatic for COVID-19 in the first UK wave of the pandemic.

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 into action for adult social care. how? IMPACT Centre
This session began with Professor Jon Glasby describing IMPACT – a new £15 million UK centre that he leads for implementing evidence i

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.