Five ways we can support you in 2015

2015 is set to be a busy year for the NHS, especially with health care being centre stage ahead of the general election. And so it will be an action-packed year for us here at the Health Foundation, with a range of new work planned to help the NHS improve the quality of care.

There are plenty of opportunities to get involved. Watch out for opportunities to apply for our improvement and leadership programmes and research funding. We’ll also be running events and webinars, and publishing a wide range of new publications, from practical guides to research reports and policy briefings. To top it all we’ll also be launching a new and improved Health Foundation website in the spring.

So there’s lots to look out for over the coming year. Here are some of the ways we can support you in 2015.

1. Funding and fellowships

Funding to unlock your improvement ideas

Our Innovating for Improvement programme is currently open for application until 10 February. We have £1.5m available for up to 20 teams to test and develop innovative ideas and approaches to improving health care delivery in the UK. Don’t miss out!

If you’ve already successfully tested an improvement and now want to deliver it at a larger scale, the next round of our Scaling Up Improvement programme will be open for application in the spring. Seven teams will receive up to £500,000 each to support the wider implementation and evaluation of their work.

Growing the future leaders of the NHS

The next round of our GenerationQ programme will be open in the summer. GenerationQ is our part time, fully-funded leadership programme for senior leaders from health care policy and practice, and the charity sector.

We’re also working closely with NHS England and other partners to design and deliver ‘a national system of NHS Improvement Fellowships’, in line with the recommendation made in the 2013 Berwick review. The first fellows with expertise in safety and quality improvement will be recruited in early 2015 so watch this space.

2. Resources to help improve the quality of care

We’re busy working on a wide range of new resources all aimed at supporting quality improvement in practice. We’ll be publishing three new practical guides to improvement in the spring, providing straightforward introductions to innovation, evaluation and spreading your improvement work.

We’ll continue to develop our online resource centres for person-centred care and patient safety, with a suite of new content planned around patient safety in maternity services which will go live in the early part of the year. We’re also adding ways to help those working in the NHS England Patient Safety Collaboratives to easily find resources related to their chosen topic areas.

Look out for the launch of our Communications improvement toolkit, full of helpful information, tips and resources for those of you wanting to communicate about your improvement work.

If you have a thirst for knowledge watch out for our new series of webinars in 2015 covering the Health Foundation’s latest research and findings from our improvement programmes. Email webinars@health.org.uk to sign up for our webinar alerts email, or explore our archived webinars.

Each month we scan all the studies about improving quality in health care to highlight research that we think is most helpful and interesting to those working in health care improvement – sign up to receive the monthly Research Scan email.

You’ll also want to read the monthly BMJ Quality and Safety journal, packed full of articles designed to advance research and inspire fresh thinking and innovation around quality improvement in health care. The journal is co-owned by the Health Foundation and BMJ.

3. Building knowledge and evidence

An ambitious programme of research

We’re investing over £4m in new research projects in 2015. Highlights include our work on evaluation (how to best evaluate, spread and scale up complex improvement projects), education (a study into current quality improvement training and education opportunities) and informatics for improvement (working with research teams who were awarded our informatics research grants at the end of last year).

Also watch out for our ‘Behavioural insights awards’. We will have £500,000 of funding available to work with a small number of organisations to carry out research into how behavioural insight thinking can encourage choices that are focused on improving the efficiency and value of services. Applications will be open in the summer, keep an eye on our newsletter for details.

Deepening our understanding of health economics

With NHS funding such an ongoing hot topic ahead of the general election, we have a range of research and analysis planned. This includes a joint report with NatCen, launching in late February, looking at public attitudes to the NHS, and econometric analysis due to be published in March which will look at the change in efficiency of providers over time. In the summer, we’ll also be publishing a report into the pressures on health funding and the potential implications for public taxation.

Over the coming months we’ll also be working with The King’s Fund to explore our concept of an NHS transformation fund in more detail. We’ll be looking at what resource would be required, how a fund could be administered, and exploring alternative sources of funding. The final report will be available in summer 2015.

Extracting new knowledge from NHS data

In 2015 we’ll start using routinely collected data to evaluate changes in health care and assess the impact of new health care policies. In particular, we’re interested in testing new evaluation models that provide real-time feedback to NHS teams, helping them to improve what they are doing. We’re also working on a new two-year project with NHS England and the University of Leicester to evaluate the use of the Patient Activation Measure (PAM) in the NHS.

Providing an independent voice on quality

Our QualityWatch programme, run in partnership with the Nuffield Trust, will continue to provide independent scrutiny into how the quality of health and social care is changing over time. As well as tracking an extensive range of quality indicators on the QualityWatch website, our ‘Focus on’ reports provide in-depth analysis on a number of key topics.

4. Contributing to the policy debate

We will be busy tracking and taking part in health care debates in the lead up to the general election. As part of this, we’ll be publishing a series of briefings on key issues such as NHS funding, quality and competition.

Our policy analysis and research this year will look at four main themes: quality and money, system analysis, implementing change, and new models of care. In particular, watch out for our report towards the end of February which will look at how we manage change in the NHS. We’ll also be launching a new online ‘policy navigator’ in the spring, providing an indepth look at the history of NHS reform.

Together with the RSA, we’ll be hosting the Great Health Think Off in March, bringing together a panel of leading think tanks and commentators to debate the big health care issues facing the politicians in the run up to the 2015 general election.

5. Keeping you up to date

For all the latest news and developments from the Health Foundation, including alerts about the latest funding opportunities, you can:

• subscribe to our monthly email newsletter
• register for email alerts to be notified when our leadership and improvement programmes are open for application and to receive email alerts when new publications are launched
• take part in conversation and debate about current health care issues on our blog
• sign up to receive our monthly research scan
• follow us on Twitter, facebook or LinkedIn.