Lord Darzi's report, NHS Next Stage Review, attempts to open a new chapter in the story of 'quality' in the English NHS: how to move on from a centrally driven performance management regime - with its focus on driving activity and meeting targets - to a more sophisticated strategy that ...
Failure to address avoidable ill health will put huge pressures on the future NHS while deepening health inequalities. This discussion paper asks why, until recently, helping people to stay healthy has had so little emphasis, and what mechanisms and incentives are needed to put wider population health at the heart ...
This book offers a radical way of thinking about organisations as living systems, and practical methods of engaging with complex social and organisational issues, which the authors call 'working whole systems'. The whole system approach they have developed involves working with many types of stakeholder. It always engages local people ...
This paper tells the story of the first two years (1994-96) of the London Health Partnership's primary care development programme. It describes the background to the project and its guiding principles, and then goes on to describe the diagnostic phase of its work and how systems theories influenced the ongoing ...
This paper offers a way of thinking about the purpose of partnership; partnership behaviours which fit different purposes; and partnership behaviours which can lead to sustainable change and are not dependent on injections of external resources. The authors have created a typology which focuses on the purpose of partnership, in ...
This paper looks at the government's plan for action zones in education, employment and health which aim to break out of the cycle of deprivation. It examines how the many individuals, groups and organisations who will be involved in the action zones will work together. The authors feel that if ...
This paper reconsiders the meaning and impact of projects, the most common device for spending development monies. They argue that projects can distort the priorities of the host organisation. There are four aspects to this problem: the disruption caused to an organisation by the existence of a project; the project ...
This report presents some of the main themes that emerged from a series of workshops on various aspects of primary care organised and hosted by the King's Fund in the summer and autumn of 1996. The topics covered in the workshops were change in primary health care, frail elderly people, ...
This report was commissioned by the King's Fund as part of the process of evaluating the impact and effectiveness of their work in the five development sites of the project. The two questions the report attempted to answer were: to what extent the sites had met the service change targets ...
The author summarises her work in undergraduate medical education at the King's Fund Centre from January 1990 to August 1995. Phase One centred on a national enquiry into the future of clinical teaching designed to raise awareness of the need for change and to build a consensus on the changes ...