Quality has been at the centre of recent NHS policy, and the NHS Next Stage Review highlighted the role of information and measurement in supporting quality improvement, particularly in relation to patient safety, clinical effectiveness and patient experience. It is therefore important to be clear how quality can be measured ...
First introduced into health care in the 1980s in the United States, and later developed and championed by Monitor in England as part of its function to support good financial and performance governance in foundation trusts, service-line reporting (SLR) and service-line management (SLM) are one approach to informed clinical leadership ...
Cancer survival rates in England are improving, but they still lag behind those in the best-performing countries in the world. The current government has identified cancer survival rates as an area for improvement and the cancer strategy commits to saving an additional 5,000 lives by 2015, but how can these ...
Quality accounts are a key mechanism through which health care organisations can demonstrate their focus on improving the quality of their service. The government has recently undertaken an evaluation of the 2009/10 quality accounts and set out their expectations for 2010/11. The King’s Fund undertook an independent analysis of a ...
Our first report identified five key themes that the health and social care system must embrace to be sustainable and to ensure quality. This second report is intended to offer a clear strategic direction to achieve the transformational change that is so urgently needed. We have worked with The King’s ... and This article is the collective effort of ten of the leading health and social care organisations in the voluntary sector. The organisations worked with The King’s Fund to establish a common position.
In this paper we set out our views on how the system of quality assurance, including regulation, needs to evolve, the principles on which it should be built and how it should operate. We argue that the system of quality assurance must support the actions and effectiveness of those working ...
In June 2015, The King’s Fund was commissioned by the Department of Health to review how the performance of local health systems could be assessed. Our review looks at how to measure the performance of health services within CCG areas, including how well these services work with social care and ...
Community health care services provide vital care out of hospital for millions of people. From children’s services to care for older people and end-of-life support, the community sector plays a key part in meeting the challenges facing our health and care system. This report presents findings from a small-scale study ...
This paper is designed as a high-level resource and reference guide for local service leaders who want to improve care for older people. Within each component of care we describe the goal that the system should aim for and then present key evidence about what we know can work, selected ...
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 ...