
Shifting care ‘from hospital to community’: where to start?
What are the opportunities to shift activity from hospital to community? Our analysis provides an evidence-based place to start.

A missing element in ‘shifting care’
Our Director, Peter Spilsbury, outlines the scale of the task when it comes to making ‘the shift from hospital to community’.
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.

‘NHS 10 Year Plan’: Strategy Unit consultation response
The Strategy Unit’s response to the Government’s current consultation on the ‘10 Year Health Plan’ for England.

Midlands Analyst Network and Huddles
The Midlands Analyst Network was created to provide a space for analysts to share information, ideas and resources, as well as seek advice and guidance from one another.

Part-time GPs and the decline in continuity of care: a cause or a symptom?
In our recent paper we explore why levels of care continuity have been declining and what might be done to turn things around.

Two sides of the same coin
Hospital demand arising from GPs not seeing patients, is eating into the resources that they would use to manage down the elective backlog. In turn, this is creating more demand for GPs.

Are GP consultation rates rising or falling? Who or what should we believe?
If the "data suggests" GP appointments are substantially higher than pre-pandemic, then what is behind patients reporting recieving fewer appointments?

GP services: new analysis and fresh insights
In our latest analysis for the Midlands Decision Support Network (MDSN), we explore the long standing problem of access to GP practice consultations we consider the implications, and explore potential solutions.

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.

Population health implications of the Covid-19 pandemic
Our new report for The Midlands Decision Support Network (MDSN) presents findings of the effects of the care disruption, from the Covid-19 pandemic, on population health. The in-depth analysis identifies which patients and health conditions should be the focus of future efforts in reducing inequalities caused by the pandemic.

Bringing patient flow modelling into general practice
With general practice appointments hitting the highest numbers on record (34.8 million in England alone in November 2021), careful organisation and planning for patient appointments is increasingly important.

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.

Strategy Unit releases opensource model for planning vaccine centre capacity
The UK is running its largest ever vaccination programme. The stakes are enormous.

Health service use in the last two years of life
Health and care services get just one opportunity to support people at the end of their life. When this support is compassionate and appropriate, unnecessary suffering can be avoided and grieving can be eased. When this is not the case, harm and distress can result. The difference in these experiences can be profound.