A great resource -the Social Prescribing and Self Care Wiki – from the Healthy London Partnership is an extensive library of resources around social prescribing and self care including policy and strategy, videos, how to commission, monitoring and evaluating and research reports.
See the Hot topic on Social Prescribing
A new MSK Knowledge Hub (a partnership between the Arthritis and Musculoskeletal Alliance and NHS England) contains lots of useful resources for clinicians and commissioners. It includes a Return on Investment tool, self management resources, indicator sets, quality standards and elearning resources among other things.
Looking for some ethnicity data on NHS workforce recently I came across a collection of Supplementary information files on NHS Digital. This is worth checking if you are looking for obscure data which NHS Digital may have collected.
Contracting for Outcomes: A Value-Based Approach. This technical paper from Capsticks (published July 2014) offers an understanding of the different contracting, reimbursement and incentive mechanisms available to deliver Value and Outcomes-Based Healthcare in a UK context.
See other Outcomes based contracting resources here.
The Department of Health has published a very useful presentation of how the is NHS spending its money – how much is allocated to different organisations from the Department of Health, and how money is allocated to CCGs. Interesting reading as well as useful presentations.
Fair shares – A guide to NHS Allocations, Department of Health, July 2017
A new NIHR study uses expert interviews, survey of CCGs, and four case studies of attempts to decommission services. It outlines good-practice principles for leading decommissioning processes and engaging service users and citizens, but concludes that although no simple decommissioning formula exists, successful programmes typically address change management and implementation, evidence and information, and relationships and politics.
Decommissioning health care: identifying best practice through primary and secondary research a prospective mixed-methods study.
Williams I, Harlock J, Robert G, Mannion R, Brearley S & Hall K.
Health Serv Deliv Res 2017;5(22)
See other resources on decommissioning on the Disinvestment page of the Handbook.
My attention has been drawn to the Patient Experience Library – www.patientlibrary.net
“UK’s collective intelligence on patient experience, much of which can be quite hard to find. For example, the local Healthwatch network (the biggest single contributor to the knowledge base) publishes thousands of reports every year, but posts them across 150 separate websites, all of which are structured differently, and many of which are poorly maintained. [The Library has] catalogued and indexed the entire reporting output (four years’ worth) which is not available anywhere else in searchable form.”
Access to the complete Library is by subscription, but worth a look to those who need this sort of information.
This research into decision making around public health in local authorities demonstrates an interesting parallel to decision making in NHS commissioning processes in CCGs.
Evidence-based medicine meets democracy: the role of evidence-based public health guidelines in local government
M.P. Kelly L. Atkins C. Littleford G. Leng S. Michie
J Public Health (Oxf) 2017, p1-7. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/pubmed/fdx002
NICE has published a number of public health guidelines developed using classical evidence based approaches. Researchers interviewed public health local authority (LA) employees in four LAs about their experiences of implementing these guidelines following the move of public health functions in 2013. Participants reported tensions between evidence based and political decision making, differences in views about what constituted “good” evidence, and that organisational life is an important mediator in the way evidence is used.
“Political decision making does not necessarily align with decision making based on the evidence from the international scientific literature, and local knowledge and local evidence are very important in ways that public health decisions are made.”
“As commissioners we are influenced by a vast range of competing factors…research evidence is one of those factors which I value highly, but it doesn’t always help us out as commissioners.”
This blog post by a CCG commissioner describes the real life issues around using research evidence in policy making.
Evidence-based policy-making: the view from a commissioner. Rachel Anthwal, Delivery Director at Bristol Clinical Commissioning Group, 10 April 2017