The government’s proposed reforms to the health and social care system include clear aspirations for the voluntary and community sector as a provider of health services, a source of support for commissioning and a partner in tackling health inequalities. However, the reforms also present a number of challenges and risks. ...
Maternity services – in common with the rest of the NHS – need to focus on new ways of working to maintain and increase levels of safety and quality of care within the resources available. There are particular pressures on maternity services because of the rise in birth rates and ...
The King’s Fund’s Time to Think Differently programme of work aims to stimulate debate about the changes needed for health and social care to meet the challenges of the future. It aims to generate new thinking about how to address these challenges and deliver a transformation in services for patients. ...
This report was commissioned by NHS Employers and the Local Government Association. and This report looks at the evidence on new roles and ways of spanning organisational workforce boundaries to deliver integrated health and social care. It finds increasing focus on roles which facilitate co-ordination and management of care, development of existing roles to increase the skill-mix and enable the provision of more ...
The King’s Fund visited six services where consultants are delivering or facilitating care outside hospital. This report presents the findings from those visits as case studies. It identifies key characteristics and challenges to this way of working and seeks out evidence of the benefits to patients and the NHS more ...
In June 2015, The King’s Fund was commissioned by the Department of Health to review how the performance of local health systems could be assessed. Our review looks at how to measure the performance of health services within CCG areas, including how well these services work with social care and ...
The creation of the £3.8 billion Better Care Fund offers a real opportunity to lay the foundations for a much more integrated system of health and care. This paper summarises the evidence from work by The King’s Fund and other research about which
approaches are likely to offer commissioners maximum ...
Health and wellbeing boards are an important feature of the reforms introduced by the government in the Health and Social Care Act 2012. Unlike other aspects of the changes, the creation of these new bodies has been widely welcomed and enjoys cross-party support. All upper-tier local authorities set up boards ...
NHS hospitals face mounting financial and workforce pressures. Reconfiguration of hospital services can provide a powerful means of improving quality in an environment where money and skilled health care workers are scarce. In some places, reconfiguration is needed urgently, in order to protect patient safety. However, the current reconfiguration process ...
Emergency admissions to hospital are costly to the NHS and also cause disruption to planned health care. Considerable efforts have been made within the health service to reduce emergency admissions, but few primary care trusts have been successful, with some primary care trusts recording an increase. In order to successfully ...