Blog

It's hard to disagree with the principle that both costs and effects of treatments need to be weighed in order to make decisions about improving value for money and productivity. For a majority of the public however, this is not a principle they hold.

In organisations like hospitals, many of the answers are found among staff rather than in the executive offices and boardrooms, says Chris Ham.

The case for change is clear; a system that listens to patients and enables them to achieve what they want to achieve in their health and wellbeing would improve outcomes and save money. But such systems still exist only in pockets around the country.

If we are seeking to truly understand health care, it is not numbers or stories, but numbers and stories that are needed, says Bev Fitzsimons.

I had watched One Born Every Minute and kept my eyes open; I’d attended NCT classes and yoga workshops; I’d done my reading. None of this really prepared me for the extreme pain and joy involved in giving birth to my first child, but it helped a bit. What I was absolutely unprepared for was the experience of being a hospital inpatient.

The government expects councils and NHS partners to achieve way too much, with too little, too soon, says Richard Humphries.

As a person and a patient, I care deeply about involvement. I know it helps me as a patient to live more sustainably with my health conditions and I know that, in turn, can help the NHS to exist more sustainably too.

How long is it reasonable to wait for treatment of depression after being referred by a GP? The results from the 2013 British Social Attitudes Survey are revealing and suggest that public expectations exceed current policy ambitions.

As the instigator of the Barker Commission's experts by experience group, I want to share my experiences to help unlock similar groups on other commissions and in the NHS.

What are some of the primary care innovations happening both abroad and in the UK? Nicola Walsh reflects on discussions at our recent conference on the role of general practice.

Grand promises have been made about the benefits of recording a deluge of personal data, but what needs to happen for these promises to be realised?

On the face of it, the CDF would seem perhaps to be a good thing, helping improve the quality of life for people at the end of their lives. But is it either a fair or efficient way for the NHS to spend its limited budget?

Parallels between the successful transformation of the Veterans Health Administration in the United States and the changes needed in the NHS in England have been made for a number of years. But recent troubles at the VA offer some important lessons for the NHS in the future.

I agreed with much of what Simon Stevens said at the Age UK For Later Life conference until he stated that he would be ‘disappointed’ if care homes still existed within the next 50 years. I didn’t get the chance to challenge him but I want to do it now.

We need to be very careful in understanding the links between choice of metrics, impact of policies and population dynamics over time when coming to conclusions about the success or failure of ambitions to narrow inequalities in health, says David Buck.

Leaders across health and care agree that much more needs to be done to address the low representation of women in senior medical leadership roles.

Although earlier rumours of the demise of the Better Care Fund – the government’s £3.8 billion pooled fund to promote integrated care – have turned out to be greatly exaggerated, the significance of the government’s latest announcement about the fund should not be.

We have ample evidence of what good care for older people looks like and numerous service models delivering it, yet we aren’t very good at disseminating good practice, and worse still at adopting and implementing improvements at scale and pace.

Patient and Family-Centred Care is a simple, low-technology approach to patient-centred service improvement – Bev Fitzsimons blogs about the benefits of using the approach, following the launch of our new toolkit with the Health Foundation.

Within the general population some people actively focus on reaching and maintaining good health, while others are more passive about the whole thing. So what makes the difference?