2015 annual report and financial statements

This document summarises our work during 2015 and also sets out our plans for 2016. It also contains our financial statements for 2015.

The Health Foundation’s aim is to improve the quality of health and health care for the population of the UK. The Foundation does this through funding a range of activities, mostly testing and spreading innovations, building evidence as to what works and why, and investing in people to build skills and capacity to make improvements. Given the significant challenges to health and health care in the UK, the Foundation has a responsibility to be as effective as possible and make every penny we spend count.

• In November 2014, our board approved a three-year strategy for the Foundation. Underpinning our strategy is the view that to make improvements in the quality of health and health care across the UK, a plural set of interlocking approaches are needed, from the front line to national policy. Our focus is not just on what changes are needed, but increasingly how they can be made more quickly and effectively.
• The Foundation is active across a range of areas, complementing its traditional focus on research, practice and fellowships in quality improvement, safety and person-centred care with a wider purview on quality, using other disciplines including economics, policy analysis and data analytics. The unifying theme is to use national policy levers, information and quality improvement techniques more synergistically, and (the latter two) on a far bigger scale than the NHS has ever seen. Our aim is also to gain a more rounded understanding of how needed change can happen most effectively, and thus how we can work with partners to make more progress.
• 2015 was a transitional year as we developed a broader set of activities to support each of our strategic aims, and recalibrated our existing work.
• In 2016 we will continue this development. Our programme of work majors on ways to make successful improvements to health and health care from the front line to system level.