Variations in health care in the NHS are a persistent and ubiquitous problem. But which variations are acceptable or warranted – for example, variations driven by clinical need and informed patient choice – and which are not? The important question is how to promote ‘good’ variation and minimise ‘bad’ variation. ...
As part of its work on the pressures faced by the NHS, The King’s Fund published its first Quarterly Monitoring Report in April this year. This is the third report and it aims to provide a
regular update on how the NHS is coping as it tackles the evolving reform ...
Many NHS hospitals will struggle to deliver productivity improvements essential to maintaining quality and avoiding significant cuts to services, according to our latest quarterly monitoring report. This is the second quarterly monitoring report produced by the Fund as we aim to provide a regular update on how the NHS is ...
Over the next few years the NHS faces two unprecedented challenges: coping with the tightest funding settlement for decades and implementing top-to-bottom reforms of the system. The broad goal of both the productivity and reform challenges is to improve NHS performance and hence the quality of patient care. But both ...
Given the wide and persistent variation in spending on cancer services, this project aimed to identify and quantify sources of variation in primary care trust (PCT) cancer spending and provide PCTs and cancer networks with a systematic way of framing decisions about the appropriate share of their total budgets to ...