After the government’s spending review, the NHS has just over two years at best to stabilise rapidly deteriorating finances and declining standards of patient care. At that point the harsh reality of planned real growth in funding of only 0.2 per cent in 2018/19 (and even less the following year) will have to be confronted. It […]
Category: The King’s fund
Chris Ham: Learning from others—devolved governance in the Australian state of Victoria
I spent a week working in Australia earlier this month and it made me reflect on similarities and differences with the NHS in England. The funding context feels quite different, with healthcare spending in Australia having risen by 5% per year in real terms over the past decade. On the day I departed, a report […]
Edward Wernick and Steve Manley: Meaningful patient collaboration—a mountain to climb?
In early September we arrived at the King’s Fund HQ in Cavendish Square to be welcomed to their new Collaborative Pairs Programme, designed to bring together 12 pairs from across the country—each made up of a healthcare professional and a patient or patient representative—to work on a shared challenge facing their local health system. The […]
Hugh Alderwick: Is the NHS delivering enough things right?
Recently, I’ve written blogs about overuse and underuse in the NHS—the problems of doing too much of the wrong things and not enough of the right ones. The final chapter in this story is misuse: when health services are poorly delivered, resulting in preventable harm to patients. In reality, the distinctions between these three concepts […]
Ruth Robertson: Frontline teams are the key to delivering better value care for patients
We need to talk about patients not pounds if we are to engage clinicians in meeting the NHS productivity challenge. That means focusing on providing the best possible health outcomes at the lowest possible cost, rather than a single-minded push to save money. This is one of the main messages from our new report, Better […]
Allison Trimble: A new relationship with patients and the community?
There are welcome signs that policy makers and NHS leaders are becoming more open to exploring how health professionals could work more collaboratively with patients as leaders—and support patients to be fully involved in their own care. The NHS five year forward view rightly calls for a new relationship with patients, citizens, and communities, describing […]
Matthew Honeyman: Reconfiguring NHS services: necessary but fraught with difficulties
With the NHS facing growing pressures on all fronts, following the general election the next government is likely to begin a new round of NHS service reconfiguration planning. In addition, work will continue to implement the new care models—such as urgent and emergency care networks and modernised maternity services—set out in the NHS five year […]
Chris Naylor: Integrated care—the end of the hospital as we know it?
Hospitals are often seen as an impediment to integrated care. The concern frequently voiced is that their dominant role in the health system makes it harder for commissioners to shift resources into the community, and to develop more coordinated services that cross organisational boundaries. It is certainly true that an over-reliance on hospital based care—and […]
John Appleby: The cost of reform
Asked in 1972 whether the French Revolution had been good or bad, the then Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai said that it was “too early to say.” As it turns out this was not an extreme example of the Chinese long view: Enlai was apparently opining about events that happened four years previously—in 1968—and not that […]
Chris Naylor: Is mental health finally becoming a political priority?
Last week saw announcements on mental health from both the government and the opposition. With the Liberal Democrats pledging to put mental health on the front page of their election manifesto, and Andy Burnham, Shadow Secretary of State for Health, making mental health a core part of his concept of “whole person care,” are we […]