The drive for greater integration of health and care services has been the central theme of UK health policy for most of the last decade.  There is near universal support for this objective, but little agreement on the best way it can be delivered. 

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.     

We’re delighted that Sir Simon Stevens, Chief Executive Officer of the NHS, has recognised the vital role of high-quality analysis.

The final week’s theme was a reflection on what had been heard in the previous weeks.

We thought about how we develop our analytical leaders by building on the success of the Midlands Population Health Management Academy and thought conceptually about ‘what makes a good decision?’, drawing on the tools and techniques shown over the course of the Festival.

Concluded by an expert panel who considered where we go from here… 

Decision-making is an art; we can train at it, rehearse and access tools to support us.

However, humans are also subject to a wide range of biases which can undermine the quality of decision making, especially in complex real-world systems.

COVID-19 has shone a light on health inequalities; it has “laid bare our longstanding social, economic and political inequalities…” (BMJ, 2020) and this is against a backdrop of declining life expectancy in our poorest communities, well before COVID-19.

The Marmot review 10 years on found that regional and socioeconomic differences in health are large and growing.

The Midlands Decision Support Unit Network has defined its analytical priorities for 20/21.

This week’s theme described the projects being carried out on behalf of the Network to respond to these priorities, the outputs they will produce and how these will be shared with the DSU Network and its partners.

This included the presentation of work already completed on behalf of the Network, focusing on resource usage in the last two years of life.

The Midlands Decision Support Unit (DSU) Network is a new and emerging approach to bring together analytical resource across a region, develop analytical skills collectively and share learning from analytical projects.

This week’s theme describes how the network will operate, shares some of the learning from systems who have adopted this approach already and describes how evidence will underpin the Network’s approach to decision-making. 

Transformation in health and care has been rapid and intensive, particularly in 2020.

Asking the right analytical questions requires joined-up approaches, between leaders and their analytical workforce, as well as broader system stakeholders.

This week’s theme focused on the vital issues facing decision-makers, the contexts they are operating in, and from where they might draw support. 

Now taking registrations of interest for our free, online 6-week festival: INSIGHT 2020  - Details of each event are below.