The Midlands Decision Support Network in association with The Strategy Unit are hosting INSIGHT 2022 our annual festival of learning and sharing events for the NHS, local government and other partners across health and care.

Our research, published in the Lancet Regional Health Europe, highlights substantial inequities in access to elective hip replacement surgery. We found no evidence that these inequities reduced between 2006 and 2016.

MDSN responds to recent reports addressing the NHS waiting list crisis

A good idea can be ruined by over-selling. The NHS has a tendency to adopt ideas and then move rapidly to wanting them to become certainties.

What begins as a proposition rapidly becomes an assertion, a statement of fact, a policy, a target, a line in a mandated planning template…an obligatory mention in every sentence for the aspiring manager.

UPDATE 10th August: Now including briefing note for Integrated Care Boards on legal duties in respect of reducing inequalities.
This report guides ICBs through the process.

In June 1976, the Sex Pistols played Manchester's Lesser Free Trade Hall. The concert turned out to be so important to music history that the usual comparisons are Woodstock and Live Aid. Under 40 people went that night, but the numbers subsequently claiming to ‘have been there when…’ are in the thousands.

‘I saw them before they were famous’ is a well-worn brag of music snobs. Yet this is our abiding feeling having facilitated AphA’s (the Association of Professional Healthcare Analysts) recent strategy away day.

The Strategy Unit has, over the last ten years, developed a way of working that has allowed us to become recognised as a leading analytical organisation in the NHS.

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?

The pace of change in the development and use of digital technology is astonishing. The use of such technology has been an essential element in the health and care services response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In many cases, the previously unthinkable became commonplace.