Analytical partnership with the Strategy Unit A collaborative partnership to address important health and care questions

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. 

Current projects

The Strategy Unit is currently collaborating on a few projects with us, including a new project exploring failure demand in the NHS.

Making sense of failure demand in the NHS – We are beginning a short project to better understand ‘failure demand’, a concept that describes the extra work created when the NHS misses opportunities to properly address patient needs. This might include repeat appointments, delayed diagnoses or long waits for treatment that reduce its effectiveness. This project will explore how to define and measure failure demand in ways that help system leaders and policymakers take action. Reducing failure demand may help improve productivity and results will also be fed into the Health Foundation’s NHS Productivity Commission. Outputs will be shared in spring 2026.

Leaving hospital without a diagnosis – Having been admitted to hospital in an emergency, one in six patients are discharged without a specific diagnosis. We are working to describe this group of patients, and examine the implications for care quality, equity, and service efficiency.

Discharge before noon - Discharging hospital inpatients in the morning, rather than in the afternoon or evening, is frequently proposed as a means of improving hospital flow. In this project the Strategy Unit will use routine administrative datasets to explore trends in variation in discharge times, and visually examine the relationship between the proportion of patients who are discharged before noon and the timeliness of care in emergency departments.

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 becomes this analysis exploring the future size of the waiting list.   

November 2023 – The Strategy Unit carried out an assessment of the data quality of the Community Services Dataset to inform the NIHR-funded DACHA study. 

September 2024 – The Strategy Unit contributed to an international study comparing emergency hospitalisation rates for mental health patients in high-income countries before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

October 2024 – The Strategy Unit produced a discussion document that explored risks to person-centred care that arise from the rapid adoption of digital technologies across the NHS. The work was informed by interviews with 15 experts, chosen for their deep expertise and breadth of perspectives on this far-reaching topic. 

December 2024 – As part of the ! becomes Network Data Lab’s study into Intermediate Care, the Strategy Unit linked the community services and admitted patient care datasets to examine the level, nature, and distribution of step-down intermediate care services in England. In a blog post, the Unit summarised its experiences of working with the Community Services Dataset.

October 2025 – The Strategy Unit carried out a qualitative evaluation of the Health Equity Payment Scheme, developed by Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland Integrated Care Board, to address limitations in the GP funding formula. Alongside observational and causal inference studies carried out by the Health Foundation, we hope the work will inform government plans to review GP funding arrangements.