The primary aim of this workbook is to provide managers, front-line workers, external and internal 'inspectors', informal carers and service users, with a shared framework for consultation and evaluation of the quality of services. It is predominantly concerned with community care; however, it has applications in acute and community services ...
In this book, top clinicians and senior managers in health services from the UK, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand write about their experiences in solving difficult problems in a way that ensures that their organisations continue to strive towards quality services. They describe how they try to resolve ...
The Health Advisory Service has been operating for almost 20 years. This is the first detailed study of its effectiveness. The authors describe how the Health Advisory Service works and reflect upon what they saw and heard in their investigation. They considered three questions - how well does the Health ...
Decisions on education for health currently take place against a background of conflicting policy and practice. So to clarify some of the main issues, this review sets out to identify trends in policy and practice in Britain in recent years, to summarise the evidence on effectiveness on some of the ...
This book is about taking the drabness and regimentation out of long-term hospital care. It is not so much about attitudes as about how, in hundreds of small, practical ways, behaviour can be changed to make hospitals more human. The book is a joint effort between staff of the King's ...
This publication contains a short essay describing the technique of cost benefit analysis as used to evaluate projects in the health service, along with a glossary and a pro-forma. They were used in a programme on cost benefit analysis held at the King's Fund College of Hospital Management in June ...
Criticisms of hospital food arise mainly from the effects of delay between cooking and eating. The Catering Advisory Service of king Edward's Fund has been particularly interested in studying ways and means of shortening this interval. This study on peripheral finishing kitchens is one of the possible solutions. It has ...
This document sets out to do three things: to make a case for the importance of systematically evaluating a carefully chosen selection of new hospital buildings and their equipment; to review critically the evaluations that have already been carried out and to describe useful methods and techniques; and to suggest ...
This document presents the evaluation of the New Guy's House: to establish as accurately as possible the extent to which the building was fulfilling the intention of those who planned it and meeting the needs of patients and staff as a surgical block; to provide guidance to other authorities who ...
Towards the end of 1969, the Belfast Hospital Management Committee asked the King's Fund to sponsor a review of the operation of the out-patient department since the implementation of the recommendations made in a previous report in 1967. This is a copy of this report which includes a summary of ...
The object of this paper is to serve as a basis for discussion about priorities for further studies into the working of health centres. The result of a short-term enquiry sponsored by the King's Fund, it is concerned with describing the suggestions made of areas needing further study; providing a ...
The boundaries between home and hospital care are constantly shifting. Care in the community for people with long term dependencies, and increasingly sophisticated primary care service and the expansion of outreach care and day surgery have all contributed to a reassessment of the central role of the hospital. This research ...
This conference was organised by the King's Fund Centre in conjunction with the Management Support and Computers Division of the DHSS. The purpose was to present and discuss progress made in developing and applying `performance criteria' in relation to assessing effectiveness and efficiency in the NHS. The performance criteria technique ...
This workbook outlining the ENQUIRE system is intended to be a practical guide to establishing and running quality assurance programmes for health and social care. The workbook is based on a number of conceptual tools, which provide both a framework for quality assurance, and assistance in appreciating its full potential. ...
The topics discussed in this document are all broadly concerned with management in medicine. They include the need to plan and to evaluate the aims and achievements of the health service, consideration of problems involved, and discussion of some techniques and recent developments.
East Birmingham Hospital's first user forum was organised as part of a project to develop a patient-centred approach in the outpatient department. The assistant unit general manager (patient services and planning) was also interested in piloting the method as a way of obtaining the views of service users, and so ...
A workshop was held at the King's Fund Centre on 3 November 1993 in which physiotherapists experienced in the treatment of neurological conditions took part to investigate the effectiveness of physiotherapy for people disabled by stroke. This report provides details of the topics discussed, and reviews the key components related ...
More disabled people are opting to run Independent Living schemes which allow them to control their own personal assistants. This report provides a guide to the different stages of setting up Independent Living schemes with appropriate back-up and support. It includes different models of Independent Living schemes, including trusts, and ...
When disabled people take the lead in evaluating community care, they produce valuable insights into service effectiveness and creative suggestions for improving services. Real changes result when community care agencies listen to and act on disabled people's assessment of services on offer. This publication discusses the benefits and practicalities of ...
This detailed independent evaluation of the Carers Impact project critically examines the effectiveness of the King's Fund model as a catalyst for change. The book assesses the work in 13 of the project's sites, looking closely at the partnerships created and the resulting benefits for carers. It contains valuable information ...
This report is a review of the evaluation of the London Initiative Zone (L.I.Z.) primary care development projects which were established through the former London Implementation Group (LIG) and which were in progress in 1995/6. It particularly focuses on the evaluation of revenue projects aimed at service development in primary ...
Total purchasing offers fundholding practices the opportunity to purchase all of the health care not included in fundholding for the patients on their lists. This report provides the first comprehensive picture of how the idea of total purchasing is being implemented in all 53 'first wave' national total purchasing pilot ...
The aim of this book is to help more people with learning difficulties get involved in evaluating their own services. It has been written for people with learning difficulties and for supporters and staff who work closely with them, and is based on a meeting held at the King's Fund ...
Community-oriented primary care (COPC) is an approach to health care which combines the principles and skills of public health and family practice. It offers participants an action-oriented framework for working together on health needs at practice level. In 1992, the King's Fund, in association with other organisations, initiated a pilot ...
In the spring of 1996, the Implementation Group of North Thames Research and Development allocated £50000 to each of thirteen health authorities for evidence into practice implementation projects. In autumn 1996, the King's Fund Management College was commissioned to evaluate the 17 approved projects. In particular, they were interested in ...
This is a report of the first year's work of Carers Impact and describes first impressions of the national picture and progress in answering the question posed. The report includes: a brief description of the background to the Carers Impact programme and its work to date; a summary of the ...
This document is the review of services to adults with mental ill health and people with learning difficulties commissioned from the King's Fund College by Hillingdon Health Agency.
In the spring of 1996, the Implementation Group of North Thames Research and Development allocated £50000 to each of thirteen health authorities for evidence into practice implementation projects. In autumn 1996, the King's Fund Management College was commissioned to evaluate the 17 approved projects. In particular, they were interested in ...
This working paper is the first report from the national evaluation of total purchasing pilot projects to provide evidence on the achievements of all 53 'first wave' pilots in England and Scotland. It also looks at the range of factors associated with more and less successful total purchasing in 1996-97 ...
There have not been any set criteria against which to assess the merits of the various ways in which total purchasing has developed nationally. An important part of the evaluation of total purchasing in the first year was, therefore, an attempt to derive success criteria which would enable comparison between ...
Many of the potential pitfalls of increasing purchaser plurality in the NHS are relevant in planning and developing general practitioner led locality commissioning. However, this involvement in commissioning or purchasing maternity care may actually provide the 'bite' necessary to move reluctant provider trusts more quickly towards services which meet the ...
This document contains copies of material produced at a Living Options Partnership meeting in Derby on 24 January 1995. The subjects under discussion were the definitions of evaluation and monitoring, and the spectrum of user involvement in the evaluation process.
This book is about taking the drabness and regimentation out of long-term hospital care. It is not so much about attitudes as about how, in hundreds of small, practical ways, behaviour can be changed to make hospitals more human. The book is a joint effort between staff of the King's ...
This report draws together the interim findings from the first two years of a three year evaluation of all first and second wave TPPs in England and Scotland which began in October 1995, led by the King's Fund. The report discusses whether first wave TPPs have developed the organisational requirements ...
The Carers Compass has been launched by Carers Impact to help health authorities, NHS trusts and primary care groups to become responsive to their needs. The Compass reflects the work being done by the 19 Carers Impact sites across the country. The Compass points to eight key things carers need ...
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 ...
In this report the authors have been concerned with the effects of reorganisation on specialist postgraduate medicine in Greater London. It draws together and comments on the various functions and activities of the postgraduate hospitals. Part 1 reviews the past and present activities of the hospitals and institutes, and Part ...
This report is the third in a series of papers. It focuses on the evaluation of intermediate care services. Previous work has dealt with a conceptual framework to clarify understanding of intermediate care, and with issues of implementation. In the last year, interest in intermediate care has made an exponential ...
In the spring of 1996, the Implementation Group of North Thames Research and Development allocated £50000 to each of thirteen health authorities for evidence into practice implementation projects. In autumn 1996, the King's Fund Management College was commissioned to evaluate the 17 approved projects. This is the second of three ...
This book - developed from a systematic review of evidence about the impact of the NHS internal market - asks what lessons can be learned from the internal market reforms, and how this knowledge can be used to aid policy-making in the future. It synthesises all the evidence on the ...
Patients need easy-to-understand and accurate information in order to make informed choices about their medical treatment, but they are not getting it. In the first study of its kind, this book reviews the quality of leaflets, videos and audio-tapes through the eyes of both patients and clinical specialists. Specific areas ...
This book is designed as a series of personal reflections on three pilot citizens' juries in health authorities around the country. The first chapter consists of a historical perspective on the contribution that citizens' juries may make to democratic practice. It concludes that a clear understanding of the objectives of ...
The authors evaluated the implementation of Health at Work, a national programme of work which has begun to open up the workplace health agenda as an organisational and leadership development agenda. Through their research and evaluation strategy they established that: workplace health interventions can make a positive difference to workforce ...
Six citizens' juries pilot schemes, sponsored by the Institute for Public Policy Research and the King's Fund, took place in the NHS between June 1996 and March 1997. This book evaluates all aspects of this experiment, from an explanation of the background to the pilots to descriptions of the jury ...
The NHS (Primary Care) Act 1997 made possible local contracts for general practice services and spawned Personal Medical Services (PMS) pilots. These are intended to make primary care services more sensitive to local needs and are therefore particularly useful in London where long-term infrastructural problems have proved intractable. The King's ...
The evaluation of the Total Purchasing Pilots (TPPs) provides important lessons for the development of the new primary care organisations envisaged in the English, Welsh and Scottish NHS white papers. Despite originating in a very different context, total purchasing was essentially about groups of practices working together to develop services ...
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 describes how creative writing was used as a method of evaluation by the Newcastle Health Partnership. It was found that in most people's work there was a tendency to focus on products and outcomes, leaving little time and space to reflect on the processes which made these outcomes ...
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 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 ...
This report describes the evaluation of total purchasing and extended purchasing sites with an interest in mental health services. A consistent objective of these sites was the improvement of communication and information flows between primary and secondary care. The priority was the development of services for people with common mental ...
This report summarises the hospital activity analysis for two types of first-wave total purchasing pilots (TPPs), 'commissioner' TPPs and 'co-purchaser' TPPs. The main objective of the analysis was to compare changes in hospital activity, in the areas for which TPPs had objectives, with those of comparators. The authors conclude that: ...
This working paper from the second year of TPPs makes the following key findings: larger TPPs are becoming high achievers; a group of TPPs (43 per cent) improved their performance over two years, about a quarter remained at the same level and about a third dropped out; a greater proportion ...
Total purchasing was the first major 'internal market' policy initiative to be extensively evaluated by the Department of Health and Scottish Office. This report draws together the main evidence from the evaluation in order to inform the development of the new primary care organisations in the NHS, which came into ...
This is the final report on the evaluation of an urban primary health care development programme undertaken by the London and Northern Health Partnerships (L&NHP). These partnerships were established in 1994 to generate a distinctive programme of work aiming to improve primary health care in urban areas, particularly in London. ...
NHS Direct is a nurse-led telephone helpline which was launched in three pilot sites in 1998. An evaluation of the first three sites is still underway and, although preliminary results show high satisfaction among service users, it is too early to draw conclusions about the impact of NHS Direct on ...
The overall aim of the third year of the national evaluation of TPPs, spanning October 1997 to September 1998, was to identify the ingredients of successful devolved purchasing based in primary care by in-depth study of twelve first wave TPPs. The analysis presented here considers eleven of the case studies ...
Under One Roof is a partnership of over 30 statutory and voluntary organisations addressing the needs of single homeless people in Lambeth and Southwark. It was awarded a King's Fund grant in 1997 with the intention of offering a new one-stop service for single homeless people and improving relationships between ...
The primary purpose of this report is to draw on the literature on joint planning focusing on practice in England and Wales with a view to identifying potentially useful lessons which might be of value in a Scottish context. The report is in five sections. Section One provides a general ...
Against a background of apparent official disinterest in monitoring of the NHS reforms, the King's Fund decided to make such evaluative work the focus of a major grants programme. Seven projects have been selected for financial support, each to run over a three year period, 1990-1993. The work of the ...
The first wave of personal medical services (PMS) pilots have now been 'live' for more than three years. Having started life in the shadow of better publicised reforms, they are now at the centre of government strategy for primary care. This publication aims to share the lessons emerging from this ...
This paper presents a resume of two evaluative projects carried out on the Central Stepney SRB (single regeneration budget): the Health Gain Project 1996-2000 and the Household Costs Project 2000-2001. On the basis of the findings, and following reflection on the Hackney and Brighton work, it calls for a rethink ...
'Working Together in London', a three-year, £2 million programme, was set up by the King's Fund, the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health and the Department of Health to support people with severe and long-term mental health problems. New assertive outreach services were established in three of London's most deprived communities ...
This is a report on the process evaluation undertaken as part of the King's Fund Promoting Patient Choice initiative. The report outlines: the background to the project; the purpose and method of the evaluation; findings from the seven sites (information about the application stage, the development process and the evaluation ...
The King's Fund has been working with the SWLPCO for three years as part of an evaluation of four PMS pilots in London. Using a variety of research methods, including in-depth interviews and a focus group with key stakeholders, a patient satisfaction questionnaire, an audit of chronic disease management and ...
The King's Fund has been working with the Isleworth Centre Practice for three years as part of an evaluation of four PMS pilots in London. Using a variety of research methods, including in-depth interviews and a focus group with key stakeholders, a patient satisfaction questionnaire, a registration questionnaire, an audit ...
The King's Fund has been working with the North Hillingdon PMS pilot for three years as part of an evaluation of four PMS pilots in London. Using a variety of research methods, including in-depth interviews, a patient satisfaction questionnaire, an audit of chronic disease management and a practice profile questionnaire, ...
The King's Fund has been working with the Edith Cavell Practice for three years as part of an evaluation of four PMS pilots in London. Using a variety of research methods, including in-depth interviews and a focus group with key stakeholders, a patient satisfaction questionnaire and a practice profile questionnaire, ...
Since 1997, there has been a growing interest in the UK in reducing health inequalities, regenerating disadvantaged neighbourhoods and ending cycles of social exclusion. Large sums of money have been invested in large social programmes, mostly designed to be implemented in partnership with local communities. This policy paper asks to ...
At the beginning of 1995 King's Fund Organisational Audit set up a project to develop organisational audit for health service commissioning. Six health authorities and five primary care organisations agreed to become pilots for the newly developed process. This report presents the results of the evaluation process, including the findings ...
This report summarises a meeting to evaluate the Carers Impact Project in Bolton. It reviewed the changes which have taken place during the course of the project and the impact on carers' lives, identifies what has helped and hindered progress, identifies how the work can continue, and evaluates the Carers ...
This report summarises a meeting to evaluate the Carers Impact Project in Tameside. It reviewed the changes which have taken place during the course of the project and the impact on carers' lives, identifies what has helped and hindered progress, identifies how the work can continue, and evaluates the Carers ...
This report summarises a meeting to evaluate the Carers Impact Project in East Sussex. It reviewed the changes which have taken place during the course of the project and the impact on carers' lives, identifies what has helped and hindered progress, identifies how the work can continue, and evaluates the ...
This report summarises a meeting to evaluate the Carers Impact Project in Hertfordshire. It reviewed the changes which have taken place during the course of the project and the impact on carers' lives, identifies what has helped and hindered progress, identifies how the work can continue, and evaluates the Carers ...
This report summarises a meeting to evaluate the Carers Impact Project in Southwark. It reviewed the changes which have taken place during the course of the project and the impact on carers' lives, identifies what has helped and hindered progress, identifies how the work can continue, and evaluates the Carers ...
This information sheet provides basic information on evaluation and includes a consideration of quantitative versus qualitative data, the Hawthorne effect, reducing bias and ethical issues
This report focusses on the fifth and final cohort of doctors who participated in the Clinical Leaders : Clinical Partners programme. It included experimental learning, reflection, relevant case material, bespoke and other simulations and shadowing
Despite the increasing popularity and use of complementary practice, it is difficult to assess its effectiveness. Lack of research - and lack of agreement on research methods - has led to criticism from branches of conventional medicine. The King's Fund set up an advisory group, chaired by Professor Dame Carol ...
This enquiry was initiated at a time when it was realised that a number of hospital authorities were beginning to think that the addition of recovery homes might assist in the solution of the problem of providing a better hospital service. A recovery home provides accommodation for patients in whom ...
'Community Development in Health: Addressing the Confusions' was a one-day conference held at the King's Fund Centre on 13 June 1984, organised by the London Community Health Resource and the Community Health Initiatives Resource Unit, in collaboration with the King's Fund. This report is a collection of papers given during ...