Mental health under pressure

"There is a clear need for mental health services to focus on using evidence to improve practice and reduce variations in care. However, it is essential that this is underpinned by stable funding, with no more cuts to budgets." 

Mental health under pressure
H Gilburt
The King's Fund
November 2015

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Accelerating improvement through systems engineering

"Systems engineering has often produced dramatically positive results in the small number of health-care organizations that have implemented such concepts. These efforts have transformed health care at a small scale, such as improving the efficiency of a hospital pharmacy, and at much larger scales, such as coordinating operations across an entire hospital system or across a community."

Better health care and lower costs: accelerating improvement through systems engineering
President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology

May 2014

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Measuring quality at a system level

"Quality is being measured and reported across healthcare organizations and sectors, but efforts are rarely made to connect the activity in one organization to quality experienced by patients and clients in another part of the healthcare system. This article describes one regional health organization's journey to measuring health quality at a system level." 

Measuring quality at a system level: an impossible task? the Toronto Central LHIN experience
R Solomon, C Damba, S Bryant
Healthcare Quarterly, 2013, 16(4): 36-42

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Improving patient safety and health care delivery

"Through a series of projects, APL and Johns Hopkins Medicine (JHM) have focused on applying a systems approach using engineering principles and best practices to hospital-based care, specifically, care in the ICU."

Systems approach and systems engineering applied to health care: improving patient safety and health care delivery
AD Ravitz, A Sapirstein, JC Pham, PA Doyle
Johns Hopkins APL Techinical Digest, 2013, 31(4) pp354-365

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Improving data use in decision making

"The overall aim of the paper is to articulate specific interventions that can improve the demand for and use of data in decision making so that improvements in the other health building blocks can be realized."

Improving data use in decision making: an intervention to strengthen health systems
T Nutley
August 2012

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