Health Management and Policy Alert

Evaluation of behaviour change interventions: school nurse toolkit

Public Health England (PHE) - 
This toolkit aims to guide school nurses through evaluations and provides guidance on how to implement results to promote learning, make improvements and demonstrate the impact of interventions.

• Toolkit
• PHE publications

GP services in Wales: the perspective of older people

Older People's Commissioner for Wales - 
This report finds significant variation in older people's experiences of accessing and using GP services in Wales, with particular issues around the appointments booking process, the accessibility of GP surgeries and the surgery environment, the time available for appointments, and community and privacy. The report calls for GP services to be more responsive to older people's needs, particularly those with sensory loss, cognitive impairment or dementia, those who are carers or who are vulnerable.

• Report
• Survey responses
• Press release

Patients first: improving patients' food and drink experience through a better understanding of their priorities

Patients Association - 
This report covers a large-scale, independent survey of patients’ preferences and experiences of hospital meals. The aim was to conduct face to face interviews with patients in hospital wards to give useful insight into their requirements and views, providing both robust numbers and a good qualitative understanding. By establishing patients’ preferences and priorities and linking this to their satisfaction with what is currently offered, it will be possible to give guidance to providers of food and meal service to develop and improve their offer.

• Report
• Summary

Reducing hospital admissions by improving continuity of care in general practice

The Health Foundation - 
This briefing summarises research that analysed data from over 230,000 anonymised patient records for older people aged 62 - 82 years. The research found that there were fewer hospital admissions for certain conditions when the patient saw the same GP more consistently. Patients who saw their usual GP two or more times out of every ten were associated with six per cent fewer avoidable hospital admissions.

• Briefing
• Health Foundation publications

Pharmacy quality payments: quality criteria guidance

NHS England - 
The quality payments scheme encourages a range of activities, carried out by community pharmacists for the first time, designed to widen their role beyond dispensing to improving the quality of health care for patients while at the same time helping to ease demand on other areas of the health system. This guidance provides information to contractors on how to claim quality payments, provide further clarification on gateway criteria and to provide information for contractors to help them demonstrate that they meet any of the eight quality payment criteria.

• Guidance
• Associated documentation

Older people's experiences of sight loss in care homes

Thomas Pocklington Trust - 
This report calls for greater visual awareness training in order to support people with sight loss living in care homes. It presents the findings of an study carried out in seven care homes and found that greater support for this group of people helped to reduce the impact of sight loss and social isolation.

• Report
• Associated documentation
• Press release

Against the odds: experiences from the NHS front line

Royal College of Physicians (RCP) - 
This report brings together the experiences of doctors working in NHS hospitals between December 2016 and January 2017. In the report, they explain in their own words what an overstretched NHS looks like in practice.

• Report
• Press release

Update on NHS Shared Business Services patient correspondence incident

House of Commons Public Accounts Committee - 
This letter from the Department of Health provides an update to the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee at her request to have regular updates provided on the misplacing of patient records. The letter outlines the costs of further clinical investigation so far and how many cases have required further clinical review.

• Letter

Commissioning for health improvement following the 2012 health and social care reforms in England: what has changed?

Policy Research Unit in Commissioning and the Healthcare System (PRUComm) - 
The wide-ranging program of reforms brought about by the Health and Social Care Act (2012) in England fundamentally changed the operation of the public health system, moving responsibility for the commissioning and delivery of services from the National Health Service to locally elected councils and a new national public health agency. This paper explores the ways in which the reforms have altered public health commissioning.

• Paper

Performance tracker: spring 2017

Institute for Government (IoG) - 
This report is the first in a series of data-driven analyses on the performance of government. The report uses government data to examine five key public services: hospitals, adult social care, police, prisons and schools. It finds that until recently the government managed to maintain the quality of public services while controlling spending however it warns that now the UK faces a combination of failing public services and breached spending controls unless urgent action is taken.

• Report
• IoG publications