The King’s Fund Point of Care programme aims to improve the experience of patients in hospital and to support staff to provide high-quality, patient-centred care. Hospital staff are working in highly pressurised environments and the nature of their work is complex, intense and emotionally challenging. This has an impact on ...
Consistent, reliable high-quality care is what all patients want and health workers aim to provide. However, the reality for most patients, particularly those in acute hospitals, often falls far short of the ideal. In the context of acute care, the risks of fragmentation and breakdown in care co-ordination are high, ...
In this response The King’s Fund highlight two pieces of their recent research: “Making shared decision-making a reality: no decision about me, without me” (Coulter and Collins 2012) produced a clear definition of shared decision-making and outlined what steps need to be taken to implement it; and “Patients’ preferences matter: ...
This is The King's Fund's response to the independent review by the Nuffield Trust commissioned by the Secretary of State for Health to consider whether aggregate ratings of provider performance should be used in health and social care. Overall, while TKF supports the government’s commitment to make more information about ...
The King’s Fund welcomes the development of the mandate to hold the NHS Commissioning Board to account for £80 billion public money. It is important that the mandate is well designed to ensure the Board can be effectively held accountable for its activities.
This document gives the King's Fund thoughts on the Communities and Local Government Committee inquiry on the role of local authorities in health issues. The Health and Social Care Act 2012 fundamentally alters the relationship between local government and the NHS. Responsibility for many public health and health improvement functions ...
People's health behaviours are widely known to affect their health and risk of mortality. Less is known about how these behaviours cluster together in the population and how multiple lifestyle risk patterns have changed over time between different population groups. Focusing on changes in the English population between 2003 and ...
The need for reform and a sustainable funding settlement for social care has never been more urgent, with local government and NHS finances under significant pressure and demand for services increasing as the population ages. The government must move quickly to bring together its response to the Dilnot report and ...
The financial pressures in the NHS are being felt particularly harshly by acute hospital trusts. A number of trusts and foundation trusts have been rated as at financial risk, and some trusts have declared themselves not financially sustainable as currently configured. These trusts will therefore not be able to achieve ...