The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has caused National Health Service (NHS) frontline operations to be stretched near breaking point.1 Despite coming under immense pressure, the service held firm at ...

NHS Direct is a 24-h patient-led telephone advice service, based in England and Wales, which aims to help callers to self-manage problems and reduce unnecessary demands on other National Health Service (NHS) provision (Munro et al., 2000a). NHS Direct is the world’s largest health care telephone advice service (Munro, 2002) and is leading the current international trend towards telemedicine and...

As phrases like "managed care backlash" become part of the lexicon in American health care policy circles, it is instructive to examine a managed competition experiment in a vastly different context. Britain's Conservative government instituted reforms in 1991 to transform the National Health Service (NHS) from a centrally administered service to managed competition between purchasers and provi...

OBJECTIVE To document the range of web and smartphone apps used and recommended for stress, anxiety or depression by the National Health Service (NHS) in England. DESIGN The study was conducted using Freedom of Information (FOI) requests and systematic website searches. DATA SOURCES Data were collected via FOI requests to NHS services between 13 February 2015 and 31 March 2015, and searches...

Martin Powell suggests that the death of the English National Health Service (NHS) has been announced so many times we are at risk of not noticing should it actually happen. He is right. If we 'cry wolf' too many times, we risk losing sight of what is important about the NHS and why.

People at HSMC 12 experience enforced changes. Even the Department of Health and national bodies such as the NHS Institute and NPSA face major re-organisation or abolishment. The potential involvement of private organisations and social enterprises could lead to the independent sector becoming a major player in direct NHS delivery and commissioning and signal the end of a largely public sector ...

Nurses have a vital role in undertaking brief interventions and directing patients to NHS stop smoking services. This article reports on an audit that aimed to determine whether the local NHS stop smoking service delivered a 52-week quit rate in line with the national average of 15 per cent, and to relate this finding to health inequalities.

Transcranial direct current stimulation is coming of age with the large treatment study published in this issue. We review transcranial stimulation methods, their efficacy and the likely impact on National Health Service (NHS) practice. Their use in individuals who do not respond to or cannot tolerate medication should now be explored in large controlled naturalistic studies in the NHS.

J Fam Plann Reprod Health Care 2006: 32(1) Background The National Health Service (NHS) in England is going through another reorganisation, in the spirit of creating a ‘patient-led NHS’. Practice-based commissioning (PBC) refers to devolution of commissioning responsibilities from primary care trusts (PCTs) to individual or groups of primary care professionals; this may be a group of general pr...