Blog

How can NHS services use their facilities to better support social prescribing? Ben Collins highlights what’s needed to make NHS sites more welcoming spaces for individuals and communities.

Digital tools and services are increasingly being used in health and care, but what happens to all the data that is collected, who should have access to it and who decides? Pritesh Mistry outlines the value of trust and transparency in these complex agreements

A resilient health and care system is about more than national action. Sally Warren shares a vision for building local resilience that would allow the health and care system to respond effectively to future crises.

Much media attention has been paid to how acute services are tackling Covid-19, but what about community health and care services? Anna Charles considers the impact of the outbreak on these often overlooked services and the role they might play in the next phase of the response.

New standards aim to improve urgent care in the community, but how easily can they be delivered? Anna Charles considers how workforce, social care and the pace of change might pose challenges for implementing these welcome plans.

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.

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.