In 2002, the King's Fund commissioned a major inquiry into the state of the capital's mental health and mental health services and how far they meet the needs of service users. The inquiry set out to: investigate whether mental health care had improved in the capital since the King's Fund ...
Social enterprises are businesses that deliver goods and services but in pursuit of primarily social objectives. The government is committed to supporting social enterprise in the economy at large and in its recent white paper has suggested that social enterprise models of service delivery can be part of the provider ...
This paper aims to shape discussion about practice-led commissioning. It asks what this kind of commissioning is intended to achieve and what it really means in the new health care context. It explores the lessons of GP fundholding, total purchasing, and locality/GP commissioning pilots, and suggests some constraints and risks ...
Nine NHS walk-in centre pilot sites opened in London during 2000. Six of the nine centres are located in hospital sites. The other three centres are in Soho in central London, the High Street in Croydon, and Parsons Green in Fulham. NHS walk-in centres are nurse-led and offer primary care ...
Primary care has been the subject of a quiet revolution in recent years, with the ending of the monopoly of provision by independently contracted GPs and the introduction of a range of new targets and new forms of first contact care. Now it is poised for further radical change with ...
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 ...
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. ...
General practice has changed considerably over the past decade. Practice size has increased, the workforce has grown and become more diverse, the range of services offered has expanded, and the contracting and financing arrangements for GPs have changed. Current government policy aims to improve access and choice for patients, to ...