What do virtual wards look like in England?
This paper explores what virtual wards currently look like across England and their effects on patients, staff and hospital capacity.
Analytical partnership with the Strategy Unit A collaborative partnership to address important health and care questions
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The Health Foundation and the Strategy Unit are combining their extensive data analytics expertise to help address key health and social care issues.
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The partnership involves delivering analysis within short time frames, in response to emerging analytical needs, as well as longer-term analytical work.
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The Strategy Unit will undertake a number of analyses during the first year of the partnership, which began in July 2023.
Analytics and data-driven technology is being used increasingly widely by the public and in health care and has the potential to benefit everyone. The Health Foundation has a track record in using data analytics to tackle real world problems in health and social care, for tangible public benefit.
Alongside undertaking our own data analysis, the Health Foundation is working in partnership with the Strategy Unit to maximise the contribution that our data analysis can make by increasing our capacity and capabilities.
The Strategy Unit is a specialist NHS team (based within Midlands and Lancashire Commissioning Support Unit) with skills across data science and analytics, including complex modelling, evidence reviews, qualitative research, problem structuring and evaluation, as well as health service expertise. The Strategy Unit has a deep knowledge of NHS datasets and the expertise to effectively analyse them.
The partnership will be responsive to emerging analytical needs, as well as enabling longer-term pieces of analytical work. It will involve a pipeline of three to five projects during the first year.
The Strategy Unit is currently collaborating on a few projects with us including: the international collaborative on costs, outcomes and needs in care, the developing research resources and minimum data set for care homes’ adoption project and supporting the Networked Data Lab.
Partnership outputs
April 2023 - The Strategy Unit and the Health Foundation collaborated on a report on NHS care delivered by the independent sector. The Strategy Unit undertook analysis of Secondary Uses Services data, on behalf of the Health Foundation.
October 2023 - The Strategy Unit supported the development of an interactive calculator in this analysis exploring the future size of the waiting list.
Further reading
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Alexander Lawless joined the Health Foundation as a Senior Data Analyst in 2023.
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Andrew Mooney joined the Health Foundation in June 2023 as a Senior Data Analyst.
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