
Hydration, UTIs and older people: learning from NHS pilots about how to improve care
Our evaluation of hydration-focused interventions for older people found promising signs of impact and highlighted the practical and systemic challenges of delivering and sustaining change.

‘To risk stratify or not risk stratify, that is the question’ (At least, it should be)
Risk stratification tools are ubiquitous in healthcare. The concept is simple and seductive.

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.

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.

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.

Advancing the analytical capability of the NHS and its ICS partners
The Strategy Unit were asked by the Strategy and Development Team in the Directorate of the Chief Data and Analytics Officer, NHSE/I, to make recommendations for advancing analytical capability across the health and care workforce.

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.

Decisions to admit patients are not solely determined by clinical risk
Whether or not to admit a patient is one of the most routine yet important decisions a doctor in an Emergency Department

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.

Strategy Unit analysis published showing changes in use of emergency departments under lockdown
We know that patterns of access to healthcare have changed during the pandemic.

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

Evaluating Artificial Intelligence: a significant new win
The Strategy Unit, the Health Economics Unit and Leicester Clinical Trials Unit have been announced as evaluation partners to support success in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Health and Care Awards.

Bringing NHS analytics into the 21st Century
A marriage usually needs (at least): a matchmaker, two entities, a (little) money, a proposal and a home.