Evidence in management decisions in health services
Features26 November 2009
This feature is one of an occasional series on current WBS research.
Several WBS faculty from the Innovation, Knowledge & Organisational Networks Research Unit IKON, together with staff from Warwick Medical School, are currently involved in a 2-year research project funded by the Service Delivery Organization of the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR ).
IKON staff involved in this project are Jacky Swan, Davide Nicolini, Harry Scarbrough, and Emmanouil Gkeredakis.
The aim of the research is to provide a better understanding of how, why and when NHS managers make decisions on commissioning health services for their local population. This is necessarily a very complex process, involving different kinds of management and different criteria. The organization and provision of local health services in England are generally made by the Primary Care Trusts, who receive a large proportion of the overall NHS budget.
Both in England and internationally, health services managers have access to numerous sources of knowledge and information needed to commission health services effectively, but it is not generally known how these resources and information are used in commissioning, nor how they are combined with local knowledge and expertise.
The Director of IKON, Jacky Swan, comments, "We also want to understand the barriers and facilitators to 'evidence-based' management in the NHS. By doing this we hope our findings can be used to improve the way knowledge is used in commissioning and thus help support better treatment for NHS patients."
More detailed information is available here.
