Health Management and Policy Alert

Delivery plan for recovering urgent and emergency care services

Department of Health and Social Care - 

To support recovery, this plan sets out a number of ambitions, including: patients being seen more quickly in emergency departments, with the ambition to improve to 76 per cent of patients being admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours by March 2024, with further improvement in 2024/25; and ambulances getting to patients quicker: with improved ambulance response times for Category 2 incidents to 30 minutes on average over 2023/24, with further improvement in 2024/25 towards pre-pandemic levels.

• Plan
• Press release

Emergency healthcare: a national emergency

House of Lords Public Services Committee - 
This report includes an action plan, setting out suggestions as to what the Government should do to address the crisis regarding access to emergency care. It finds that, in many cases, patients are attending emergency care services because they have, or feel they have, no alternative. The report concludes that the Government should consider, consult upon, and establish a bold and ambitious new operating model for emergency health care.

• Report
• House of Lords Public Services Committee - news

Our support for adult social care this winter

Department of Health and Social Care - 

This document sets out how the Department of Health and Social Care is supporting the adult social care sector during winter 2022 to 2023. It is aimed at care providers, local authorities, integrated care systems, carers and social care staff.

• Policy paper
• Press release

The health policy year in review 2022

The King's Fund - 

Just when you thought things couldn’t get any stranger, 2022 happened. Here's The King’s Fund’s Chief Analyst, Siva Anandaciva's, annual look at what the health policy year had in store.

• Blog

Recovering elective waits inclusively: where to start?

The King's Fund - 

In this blog, Beth Sutherland (NHS Graduate Management Training Scheme trainee at The King's Fund) shares early findings from a new project looking at how the NHS can combine the aims of clearing the elective backlog and tackling health inequalities.

• Blog

NHS funding, resources and treatment volumes

Institute for Fiscal Studies -
This report looks into the resources available to the NHS and how they are being used, looking beyond just the waiting list. It examines how the funding, staffing and hospital beds available to the NHS have changed since 2019 and how the number of patients treated by the NHS in eight different areas compares with 2019 levels. It finds that for most areas of care, the NHS is still struggling to treat more people than it was pre-pandemic, despite having – on the face of it – additional staff and funding. The report considers a range of different factors that could explain this seeming fall in performance and output.

• Report
• Institute for Fiscal Studies - publications

GIRFT diagnostics delivery guide: a guide for systems in delivering effective diagnostic services to support elective recovery

Getting It Right First Time (GIRFT) - 

Aimed at NHS leaders and managers at regional, system and trust level, and clinicians, healthcare professionals and managers working in diagnostic services and clinical specialties, this delivery guide offers practical advice on steps for delivering a more effective service, as well as ways for primary care and acute services to free up diagnostic capacity by reducing unnecessary referrals.

• Guide
• More detail

Strategies to reduce waiting times for elective care

The King's Fund - 

The King's Fund undertook research to understand the strategies that have been used to reduce waiting times in the past 20 years.

• Report
• Associated blog

Disordered activity? A review of the quality of epilepsy care provided to adult patients presenting to hospital with a seizure

National Confidential Enquiry into Patient Outcome and Death (NCEPOD) - 

Data from 610 clinical questionnaires, 264 sets of case notes and 158 organisational questionnaires were used to assess the quality of care provided to adult patients with a pre-existing epilepsy disorder or who were subsequently diagnosed with epilepsy and presented to hospital following a seizure, between 1st January and 31st December 2020.

• Report
• More detail 

Waiting on the waiting list, but what for?

The King's Fund - 

Media coverage tends to imply that the waiting list in England is mainly made up of those waiting for hospital admission. But this doesn't tell the whole story. Saoirse Mallorie explores what the data can tell us about what people are waiting for.

• Blog