This report is based on a conference which aimed to make health services more user-friendly. The purpose of the conference was to learn from initiatives across the public sector and to learn about the practicalities as well as the politics of making public services more responsive to the people who ...
It is widely believed that homeless people place considerable demands on emergency hospital services, but quantifying this in a systematic way has proved difficult. The primary purpose of this paper is to develop a better empirical understanding of the nature and extent of unplanned admissions to acute hospitals in London ...
This publication is a practical workbook to help local and health authorities as they implement the NHS and Community Care Act. It lays the foundation on which they can build better practical support for carers in the new community care era. Developed in consultation with carers, service users and community ...
Medical technology, defined broadly to include drugs, procedures and equipment used singly or in combination, has been of enormous benefit in improving the quality of health care. It has, however, raised many issues about how society can afford to pay for these often expensive developments and about associated ethical problems ...
This report is an account of the Camberwell project, from 1985 to 1989. The project is based in a medical school department of general practice and is a team-based approach to the now widely used term 'facilitation' in primary care. This report explores the project's role and function, in particular ...
This report examines the history of the series of policy initiatives concerning the use of land and buildings in the NHS. It considers the political and managerial intentions which lay behind the 1983 Ceri Davies report, and charts the extent to which the series of proposals which it produced have ...
There is widespread acceptance of the need for health care professionals to obtain the views of service users but there is confusion over the best way of accomplishing this task. What is offered here is a practical guide to enable health care professionals to decide from whom they want to ...
Health care professionals face increasing pressure to obtain the views of service users and yet many are concerned that there may be some users, such as those suffering from mental distress, who are unable to provide useful or valid opinions about services received. This publication aims to reassure those who ...
Compared to other health services, outpatient departments attract high levels of patient dissatisfaction and yet surveys of outpatients with the aims of improving services have been taking place for several years. So why is there still a high level of dissatisfaction? One of the reasons is that surveys are not ...
The boundaries between home and hospital care are constantly shifting. Care in the community for people with long term dependencies, and increasingly sophisticated primary care service and the expansion of outreach care and day surgery have all contributed to a reassessment of the central role of the hospital. This research ...