Accident and Emergency wait times seem to be constantly in the news. Less commonly but equally importantly are headlines that waiting lists for elective operations and procedures are on the rise. Although these topics hit our headlines regularly there is actually very little evidence and understanding behind the reasons for these changes in NHS services, and how the NHS can take positive action to cope with these issues.
From what we understand a lot of the currently held beliefs around the causes for pressure on NHS services come from very basic, non peer-reviewed, and potentially flawed analyses. It does not need too much explaining that making decisions based on these might be a bad idea.
If you surf to a news website right now or flick on the TV news this evening, you might for a moment think that you watching a bad science fiction movie of a dystopian future starring your local A&E department. Sadly, it is real. The news has gone mad about A&E and the waiting time crisis that it faces. This morning the BBC reported that only 82% of patients are meeting the four-hour waiting time target. It doesn’t make pleasant reading.
Many of us don’t fully understand what our kidneys are for or how they work, but they are important to all of us. A team of us a CLAHRC Wessex have been conducting a big research project to find out more about something called ‘Acute kidney injury’, which is when the kidney suddenly stops working properly. This can make people very ill by causing a build-up of waste products in the blood and upsetting the balance of fluids in the body. As a result, people with acute kidney injury can have longer hospital stays and can experience serious consequences, such as needing dialysis or even dying.
In Hampshire, Solent NHS Trust and Commissioners are making use of advanced Health Systems Analytics to visualise their demand, and support their decisions about the how many sexual health clinics should be funded to meet future patient need.
Previously I have written about using a detailed computer model to ask ‘what-if’ an emergency department could be run differently. Hidden away in complex models like these are important rules of thumb that tell us how to efficiently manage patient flow.
Dr Tom Monks puzzles the opportunities and pitfalls of modelling large parts of the health care system and how this might help patients waiting to leave hospital.
I work as a modeller for CLAHRC Wessex. In part that means I spend a lot of time speaking to health care professionals and commissioners about their priorities and teasing out if modelling could help. More and more often I am asked “can we model the whole health care system?”.
In the many discussions I’ve had people about our newly established and growing CLAHRC programme of research and implementation, it often centres on the question of what is Applied Health Research? Is it different from more conventional bio-medical research? It made me think that we need to be a bit more explicit about this thing called Applied Research. So here goes.
This site promotes independent research by the National Institute for Health Research Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRC) Funding Scheme. The views expressed in this blog are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the NHS, the National Institute for Health Research or the Department of Health
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