1 National Health Service. Consultant treatment outcomes. Available from http://www.nhs.uk/choiceintheNHS/Yourchoices/ consultant-choice/Pages/consultant-data.aspx (accessed 15 September 2013) 2 National Health Service England. Press release 28/6/13: Major breakthrough in NHS Transparency as consultant mortality data goes online for first time. Available from http://www.england.nhs. uk/2013/06/...

OBJECTIVE The study aimed to establish current levels of overseas volunteering and placement activity across all staff grades within the National Health Service (NHS) in the North West of England. DESIGN Cross-sectional survey. INSTRUMENT Descriptive statistics. SETTING 4 main regional hospitals in the North West of England, and additional NHS staff training events. PARTICIPANTS Conveni...

STUDY OBJECTIVE This paper is based on a qualitative study that aimed to identify factors that facilitate or impede evidence-based policy making at a local level in the UK National Health Service (NHS). It considers how models of research utilisation drawn from the social sciences map onto empirical evidence from this study. DESIGN A literature review and case studies of social research proje...

BACKGROUND Mental health units in England had to become smoke-free by law from July 2008. Concerns regarding the implementation and enforcement of smoke-free policies in these settings have been raised. AIMS To study difficulties and challenges associated with smoke-free policy implementation in English National Health Service (NHS) mental health settings. METHOD Questionnaire survey of all...

OBJECTIVES To quantify service integration achieved in the national exemplar programme for single call access to out of hours care through NHS Direct, and its effect on the wider health system. DESIGN Observational before and after study of demand, activity, and trends in the use of other health services. PARTICIPANTS 34 general practice cooperatives with NHS Direct partners (exemplars): fo...

Since 1948 health care in the United Kingdom (UK) has been centrally funded through the National Health Service (NHS). The NHS provides both primary and specialist health care which is largely free at the point of delivery. Family practitioners are responsible for registered populations of patients and typically work in groups of 4-6 self-employed physicians. They hire nurses and a range of oth...

BACKGROUND A number of policy documents suggest that health services should be taking climate change and sustainability seriously and recommendations have been made to mitigate and adapt to the challenges health care providers will face. Actions include, for example, moving towards locally sourced food supplies, reducing waste, energy consumption and travel, and including sustainability in poli...

Health spending per capita in England has more than doubled since 1997, yet relatively little is known about how that spending is distributed across the population. This paper uses administrative National Health Service (NHS) hospital records to examine key features of public hospital spending in England. We describe how costs vary across the lifecycle, and the concentration of spending among p...

The UK National Health Service (the 'NHS'), encouraged by the 2011 report Innovation Health and Wealth, Accelerating Adoption and Diffusion in the NHS, and empowered by the Health and Social Care Act 2012, is in the process of adopting a new agenda for stimulating innovation in healthcare. For this, the bodies, body materials, and confidential health information of NHS patients may be co-opted....

BACKGROUND NHS Health Checks are a national cardiovascular risk assessment and management programme in England and Wales. We examined the experiences of patients attending and healthcare professionals (HCPs) conducting NHS Health Checks. METHODS Interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of 28 patients and 16 HCPs recruited from eight general practices across a range of socio-economic ...