The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) is responsible for setting the overall direction for social care policy and funding in England. Recently DHSC has developed in-house modelling capacity to examine likely implications of possible reforms to the system for funding social care. This...

On 5 July this year the NHS will be 70. In all its 70 years it has rarely been far from the headlines. It has been through more than its fair share of reforms, crises and funding ups and downs. Over that period, the amount we spend on it has risen inexorably. Yet, today, concerns about the...

Health spending, and the performance of the NHS, will feature prominently in the upcoming general election campaign. Many different factors matter for NHS performance and for the wider health of the population, but one important factor is the level of spending on health services. In this IFS...

Against a backdrop of increasing demands for health care, the National Health Service (NHS) has long sought ways to increase the number of staff available to provide care to patients. More doctors, nurses, midwives and health-care assistants (HCAs) mean that the NHS can deliver more, and...

One year ago, NHS England published its plan to tackle the backlog of elective care, which had surged following the onset of the pandemic. Since then, as widely expected, waiting lists for NHS treatment in England have continued to grow, increasing by around 1 million between February and...

There are marked differences in life expectancy between the regions of England, between the countries in the UK, and between the UK and other wealthy countries. Within England, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, life expectancy at birth was more than two years higher in London and the South East...

Policies that aim to reduce the prevalence of obesity have been high on the policy agenda for many years - see, for example, DHSC (2020) and Dimbleby (2021). Understanding the costs associated with obesity is important for informing policy. Bell and Deyes (2022) have recently produced what are,...

The 2020 NHS People Plan committed to providing flexible working opportunities to all NHS staff. An important component of flexible working is less-than-full-time (LTFT) working, enabling staff to balance paid work with other commitments. However, there is currently only limited empirical...