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

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.

Inclusive Elective Care Recovery
These case studies present the key features and learning from local initiatives which championed inclusive approaches to elective care recovery.

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.

We saw them before they were famous: reflections on AphA’s away day
In June 1976, the Sex Pistols played Manchester's Lesser Free Trade Hall.

‘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?

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

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.

Increasing vaccine uptake
The purpose of this work was to identify the key features of local initiatives which encourage vaccine uptake in different population groups, and share these for others to learn from.

NHS-R: 2020 in Review
In 2020, collaboration and community meant more than ever.

Equity and Cost Growth in Specialised Services
NHS specialised services provide care for people with complex or rare medical conditions.

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.