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Our work

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summary flow chart
Tool 02/10/2025

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.

carer holding had with elderly person in wheelchair
Blog post 24/09/2025

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’.

Report 07/05/2025

Are there any non-technical ‘rules of thumb’ for assessing the quality of analysis?

The report below is from a short project that explored a simple set of questions:

Report 13/12/2024

‘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.

Report 15/10/2024

What are the downsides of digital?

What are the downsides of digital?

Report 29/02/2024

MDSN: GP practice productivity, efficiency, and continuity of care

GP Practice productivity, efficiency, and continuity of care

Report 29/02/2024

MDSN: The gap between need and supply of GP practice consultations

The gap between need and supply of GP practice consultations

Podcast 29/02/2024

MDSN: Long-term trends in GP practice Consultation Rates

GP practice consultations are, by some distance, the most common interaction between the NHS and the population it serves.

dandelion with seeds floating away
Report 31/01/2024

A Picture of End-of-Life Care in England

Working with Macmillan our analysis investigates who is more likely to experience poor outcomes associated with shortcomings in end-of-life care? Are there particular areas in England where those at end-of-life face significant challenges and how might the supply of services in an area be influencing these?

Report 03/05/2023

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.

ICS intelligence functions graph
Report 21/03/2023

ICS intelligence functions – a toolkit to support the implementation of NHSE guidance

In 2020, NHSE

graphic showing inequality being erased with eraser
Report 04/11/2022

What are the ethical challenges in addressing inequities?

Produced by Angie Hobbs - the world’s first Professor in the Public Understanding of Philosophy – this paper examines the ethical questions raised by our report outlining strategies for reducing inequity.

Report 29/03/2022

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.

Report 28/10/2021

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.

Report 15/10/2021

Strategy Unit devises a new method for classifying outpatient appointments

The number of outpatient attendances in England is now approaching 100 million each year.

Report 22/01/2021

Equity and Cost Growth in Specialised Services

NHS specialised services provide care for people with complex or rare medical conditions.

Report 10/11/2020

Mental Health Surge Model

Early in the Covid pandemic, it became clear that people’s mental health would suffer. Whether through bereavement, unemployment, social isolation, not being able to access support services – or a host of other routes – an alarming picture began to emerge and attract attention.

Report 05/10/2020

Socio-economic and environmental impact of Herefordshire and Worcestershire STP

Anchor institutions are large, typically non-profit, public sector organisations whose long-term sustaina

Report 21/09/2020

How can we learn from changes in practice under COVID-19

During the COVID-19 pandemic we have seen rapid changes in ways of working.

Report 29/07/2020

Modelling the impact of covid on waiting lists for planned care

Working with the national collaboration to coordinate covid-related analysis, and the NHSE/I Midlands region, the Strategy Unit has produced a ‘systems dynamics’ model of waiting lists for planned care. The model is freely available for non-commercial use across the NHS. Here, Steven Wyatt and Mike Woodall explain what we did and how we did it.

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