Rapid evaluation of the Special Measures for Quality and challenged provider regimes: a mixed-methods study.

Background: Health-care organisations in England that are rated as inadequate for leadership and one other domain enter the Special Measures for Quality regime to receive support and oversight. A 'watch list' of challenged providers that are at risk of entering Special Measures for Quality also receive support. Knowledge is limited about whether or not the support interventions drive improvements in quality, the costs of the support interventions and whether or not the support interventions strike the right balance between support and scrutiny.

Impact on all-cause mortality of a case prediction and prevention intervention designed to reduce secondary care utilisation: findings from a randomised controlled trial.

Background: Health coaching services could help to reduce emergency healthcare utilisation for patients targeted proactively by a clinical prediction model (CPM) predicting patient likelihood of future hospitalisations. Such interventions are designed to empower patients to confidently manage their own health and effectively utilise wider resources. Using CPMs to identify patients, rather than prespecified criteria, accommodates for the dynamic hospital user population and for sufficient time to provide preventative support.

Special Measures for Quality and Challenged Providers: Study Protocol for Evaluating the Impact of Improvement Interventions in NHS Trusts.

Background: Healthcare organisations in England rated as inadequate in terms of leadership and one other domain enter the Special Measures for Quality (SMQ) regime to receive increased support and oversight. There is also a 'watch list' of challenged National Health Service (NHS) providers at risk of going into SMQ that receive support. There is limited knowledge about whether the interventions used to deliver this support drive improvements in quality, their costs, and whether they strike the right balance between support and scrutiny.

Association of quality of paediatric epilepsy care with mortality and unplanned hospital admissions among children and young people with epilepsy in England: a national longitudinal data linkage study.

Background: Concerns have been raised about variation in care quality and outcomes among children and young people with epilepsies in England. We aimed to investigate the association between quality of paediatric care, hospital admissions, and all-cause deaths among epilepsy patients.

Methods: In this longitudinal data linkage study of paediatric epilepsy services in England, we linked unit-level data from round 1 (2009-11) and round 2 (2013-14) of the Epilepsy12 national clinical audit, with death registrations from the UK Office for National Statistics and data for unplanned hospital admissions from Hospital Episode Statistics.

Observational study to determine the utility of hospital administrative data to support case finding of English patients at higher risk of severe healthcare-related harm.

Objectives: To identify ways of using routine hospital data to improve the efficiency of retrospective reviews of case records for identifying avoidable severe harm DESIGN: Development and testing of thresholds and criteria for two indirect indicators of healthcare-related harm (long length of stay (LOS) and emergency readmission) to determine the yield of specified harms coded in Hospital Episode Statistics (HES).

Setting: Acute National Health Service hospitals in England.

Participants: HES for acute myocardial infarction (AMI), bowel cancer surgery and hip replacement admissions from 2014 to 2015.

Use of age-specific hospital catchment populations to investigate geographical variation in inpatient admissions for children and young people in England: retrospective, cross-sectional study.

Objectives: To develop a method for calculating age-specific hospital catchment populations (HCPs) for children and young people (CYP) in England. To show how these methods allow geographical variation in hospital activity to be investigated and addressed more effectively.

Design: Retrospective, secondary analysis of existing national datasets.

Hospital differences in patient satisfaction with care for breast, colorectal, lung and prostate cancers.

Background: We have investigated cancer patient satisfaction with care and the extent to which it varies between and within hospitals.

Design And Methods: A national survey of cancer patients in England with questions in 10 different dimensions for four common cancers: breast, colorectal, lung and prostate (55,674 patients). We compared hospitals across tumour types, and against the national average.