This is a piece of independent research conducted by the authors at the King's Fund based on a Pfizer initiative. and Extending patient choice is central to the government's reform of the NHS. Patients will be offered a choice of hospitals for planned operations from December 2005 and will soon be offered choice in other areas of health care. This paper presents the key findings from ten focus groups held to ...
Working group included Keith Palmer and Rebecca Rosen of the King's Fund. and Recent changes in the NHS have triggered significant expansion in the involvement of independent and voluntary sectors in the delivery of services. How can this involvement be developed to ensure quality of care for patients and to enrich choice? This question was addressed by a small independent working group, commissioned ...
In January 2006 the Department of Health published Our health, our care, our say: a new direction for community services. It is the government's seventh White Paper on health since coming to office in 1997 and, after several years of reform aimed at the acute hospital sector, it represents what ...
In December 2006, the Department of Health issued its second 'operating framework', The NHS in England: The operating framework for 2007/08, which provides a set of rules and guidance for NHS organisations in England for the year ahead. Aimed primarily at managers and clinical staff, the operating framework for 2007/8 ...
The 2006/7 Operating Framework, published at the end of January 2006, sets out the Department of Health's priorities for the NHS in England over the next financial year, a year which the document expects to be 'challenging'. It is aimed primarily at NHS managers and their counterparts in local government. ...
Attempts to give more choice to users of public sector services has been a major theme of the Labour government's public sector modernisation programme. Policies have been developed in health care, education and social housing that aim to give users a greater choice of publicly or privately owned providers, and ...
'Free choice' - allowing patients being referred for non-urgent treatment to choose a hospital anywhere in England - begins in the NHS in England in April 2008. It is another milestone in a policy that aims, among other things, to use consumer pressure to improve the quality of hospital services ...
As part of Lord Darzi's review of the NHS, each strategic health authority (SHA) outside London was commissioned to produce a report outlining their 'vision' for care in their region over the coming decade. This briefing provides a thematic summary of some of the key features of the nine SHA ...
For the past three years patients referred by their GP for a specialist outpatient consultation have had a choice over where to be treated. As part of a larger research project, a survey was sent to patients in four case study areas of England to ask them about their experience ...