This research summary outlines recent King's Fund work on waiting times, supported by the Department of Health. The research set out to learn from three groups of hospitals: those that have proved able to sustain reductions in waiting times; those with variable performance and those with a poor record on ...
This report considers issues facing stakeholders in London who are working on two problems: "how do we build healthy and safe communities in the capital?" and "what role does the NHS have in improving community safety?" It is written for policy makers and practitioners in the NHS and its partner ...
Anna Coote is the Director of the Public Health Programme at the King's Fund. and This is a summary of the report of the same name. The NHS is more than a provider of health services. It is the largest single organisation in the UK. Its potential impact on health, the environment, and the social and economic fabric of our lives is vast. Claiming the ...
Practice-based commissioning (PBC) is a policy intended to give more decision-making power over NHS resources to general practitioners (GPs), and allow them to design and deliver completely new services or commission others to do so. It has a number of underlying policy objectives including delivering more cost effective and convenient ...
The NHS has moved from an overall net deficit to a net surplus within a year, according to the figures released by the government in June 2007 (Department of Health 2007), reversing a three year trend towards increasingly large gross deficits. The government argues that these latest figures show that ...
The NHS has rarely managed to balance its books exactly; in many years it has overspent, and in some it has carried a surplus. In the financial year 2005/6 it is likely to record a substantial overspend - in gross terms, around £900 million, equivalent to around £700 million net ...
Attempts to give more choice to users of public sector services has been a major theme of the Labour government's public sector modernisation programme. Policies have been developed in health care, education and social housing that aim to give users a greater choice of publicly or privately owned providers, and ...
'Free choice' - allowing patients being referred for non-urgent treatment to choose a hospital anywhere in England - begins in the NHS in England in April 2008. It is another milestone in a policy that aims, among other things, to use consumer pressure to improve the quality of hospital services ...