Although its budget was protected in the 2010 Spending Review, the NHS faces the tightest financial settlement in its history. To avoid reducing quality and making significant cuts to services, it needs to find £20 billion in productivity improvements by 2015. Reductions in the prices paid to hospitals for treating ...
The impact of funding cuts to the NHS has been widely reported and discussed, but less attention has been given to social care – and, most importantly, to the inter-relationships of health and social care. Social care funding has increased in real terms for the past decade, but there has ...
The King’s Fund visited six services where consultants are delivering or facilitating care outside hospital. This report presents the findings from those visits as case studies. It identifies key characteristics and challenges to this way of working and seeks out evidence of the benefits to patients and the NHS more ...
This case study explores community virtual wards based in GP practices within South Devon and Torbay Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG). Community virtual wards were first introduced by Devon Primary Care Trust in 2010 to proactively identify those at high risk of emergency admissions using a predictive risk tool and to ...
This paper explores factors that might be driving the significant variation in use of hospital beds by patients over 65 admitted as an emergency. It considers the contribution made by patient-based (demand-side) factors, hospital (supply-side) factors, the availability of community services and resources, and broader system relationships (how care systems ...
This data briefing aims to highlight for commissioners the opportunity for improving the quality of care and saving costs that reducing emergency hospital admissions for ambulatory care-sensitive conditions (ACSCs) presents. It uses Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) data to examine the sociodemographic
patterns of emergency admissions for each ACSC and calculates ...
Consistent, reliable high-quality care is what all patients want and health workers aim to provide. However, the reality for most patients, particularly those in acute hospitals, often falls far short of the ideal. In the context of acute care, the risks of fragmentation and breakdown in care co-ordination are high, ...
This paper summarises presentations made at a seminar held at The King’s Fund in April 2010. The seminar brought together case studies from the NHS in England, Kaiser Permanente in California and the independent sector, as well as research evidence, to explore what has been tried and what has worked ...
Emergency admissions to hospital are costly to the NHS and also cause disruption to planned health care. Considerable efforts have been made within the health service to reduce emergency admissions, but few primary care trusts have been successful, with some primary care trusts recording an increase. In order to successfully ...