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.

Community services are a vital part of delivering co-ordinated care, and could be the answer to many of the health service’s woes in the future, says Bev Fitzsimons.

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.

With hospital workloads increasing on all fronts, John Appleby takes a look at the key trends and data to explain what's going on.

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.

2014/15 looks like being a watershed year in which the NHS moves decisively into deficit, so where do the opportunities lie in delivering better value?

There is a growing disquiet around mental health. Across the board people are calling for change, but what exactly is it that needs to be done and how can we bring about the ‘parity of esteem’ that we all seek?

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.

New organisational models for the NHS could bring benefits but it's the quality of leadership alongside a culture of excellence in performance and accountability for results that will be key, says Candace Imison.

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.

In light of our new report on the NHS productivity challenge, Chris Ham calls for a new transformation fund to stop the NHS approaching a major financial crisis.

Here’s a puzzle for you. You have a population of one million people, three psychiatrists, and no mental health nurses. How do you go about delivering mental health care?

Dominic Stenning is a member of the experts by experience group for the Commission on the Future of Health and Social Care in England. He spoke at the launch of the interim report, giving a frank and compelling patient perspective on the health, mental health and social care system.

David Oliver, the author of our new report on caring for an ageing population, presents the arguments for a whole systems, end-to-end redesign across all services and stages of health for local older populations.

With an ongoing ambition to shift care out of hospitals and closer to people’s homes, what is needed to transform community services?

The focus on delivering improvements in mental health care is currently dominated by how funding is allocated. But in the midst of the debate, little thought has been given to who should receive this money, and importantly how this could lead to reforming the system.