Goal: To provide high quality evidence for making improvements in quality, safety, and experience of care.
Achievements: We have conducted studies across a range of care settings, including primary, hospital, mental health, and community care. These include the first ever randomised trial of the impact of varying the frequency of blood donation, yielding findings that allow better management of the supply to the NHS of units of blood with in-demand blood groups. Our studies of patients’ experiences of care have revealed how specific patient populations (such as those of minority ethnicity) may have poorer experiences than others. Our research has challenged current policy orthodoxy on people’s preferences for place of death, demonstrating that dying at home may not be the universal choice it is often portrayed.
Future plans: We will establish a new institute for the study of healthcare improvement, with £42 million support provided by the Health Foundation. This institute will develop and test creative solutions to big healthcare problems by bringing together multidisciplinary expertise, strengthening the science behind the study of improvement, evaluating specific interventions and programmes to assess their effectiveness and cost-effectiveness, and figuring out how successful improvements can be replicated and scaled and where disinvestment is warranted.