Blog

The NHS needs to effectively manage its common resources more money and greater efficiency won't be enough.

Misuse occurs in the NHS when health services are poorly delivered. So how big is the problem of preventable harm in health care?

Underuse happens when effective care isn’t delivered when it’s needed and it can lead to people needing more complex care as their conditions get worse. So, where might the NHS not be delivering enough of the right things?

More health care is not always better health care. Sometimes the NHS delivers services that people don’t want or need: the problem of overuse.

The rising trend in cheaper generic medicines rather than proprietary or branded drugs being prescribed and dispensed has saved the NHS billions of pounds and enabled millions more prescriptions to be dispensed.

The rising proportion of operations carried out as day cases over the past few decades has been good for patients and a much more efficient use of NHS resources, says John Appleby.

Let the third sector be round the table when plans for communities are being shaped, says our guest blogger Sarah Swindley, Chief Executive of Lancashire Women’s Centres.

There is a long way to go before mental health achieves ‘parity of esteem’ with physical health, and the voluntary and community sector is key to helping address this challenge.

‘Implementing the Forward View’ is often synonymous with ‘establishing multispecialty community providers and primary and acute care systems’. But this risks leaving behind the more radical chapter of the Forward View – chapter two, on engaging patients and communities.

The NHS faces three major challenges in 2015: preparing for the spending review, achieving much closer integration of health and social care, and ensuring that the NHS has the leadership in place to deliver the highest possible standards of care within available resources.