In the UK, the issue of medical regulation and public trust is now highly politicised. Yet the UK is not alone in finding that citizens and doctors are having to redefine their traditional relationship. In all countries, citizens are demanding more and better health care and governments are having to ...
This paper aims to support primary care groups (PCGs) planning to develop local services for older people and carers. It provides a comprehensive overview of current policy developments and draws on the wider literature to discuss the likely issues and challenges that PCGs will face in reshaping services for their ...
NHS Direct is a nurse-led telephone helpline which was launched in three pilot sites in 1998. An evaluation of the first three sites is still underway and, although preliminary results show high satisfaction among service users, it is too early to draw conclusions about the impact of NHS Direct on ...
This report focuses on the 16 TPPs in England which pursued the objective of reducing acute hospital emergency admissions and/or length of stay to at least the end of the second 'live' year, March 1998. The analysis of hospital episode statistics was undertaken in order to establish whether the action ...
The fundamental questions about the role of primary care in public health are: how can primary care develop its input into public health while also remaining focused on meeting the health care needs of individual patients and their families, and, how can GPs and others in the primary health care ...
This report describes a conference held towards the end of a programme of study set up to identify the learning needs of clinician and the organisational changes required if patients' information needs are to be fulfilled. Prior to this conference, clinicians had been surveyed to identify learning needs and organisational ...
The overall aim of this project was to explore the process of obtaining informed consent in dentistry in order to develop a model for good practice. The specific aims were to find out the range of clinical practice, and discover any difficulties that dentists and patients encounter, including categories of ...
This paper analyses the experiences of other city-wide authorities in the UK and internationally in improving health. It sets out which cities were studied and why, outlines the different ways in which Mayors work to affect change, identifies the available evidence of action to improve health in selected cities, and ...
Since the Labour government came to power in 1997, waiting lists have attracted unprecedented attention. For a time, the number of patients recorded as waiting for hospital treatment fell, but at the same time, numbers waiting more than 13 weeks for an outpatient appointment rose. This outcome had been anticipated ...
Because the NHS was founded to provide equal access to all on the basis of need rather than the ability to pay, price was eliminated as a method of bringing demand for services into line with supply. This means that the Government has to make decisions about the amount of ...