Caroline De Brún

Caroline De Brún
Caroline has been a medical librarian in a variety of NHS and academic roles since 1999, working in academic, primary and secondary care settings, service improvement, knowledge management, and on several high profile national projects. She has a PhD in Computing and currently develops resources to support evidence-based cost and quality, including QIPP @lert, a blog highlighting key reports from health care and other sectors related to service improvement and QIPP (Quality, Innovation, Productivity, Prevention). She also delivers training and resources to support evidence identification and appraisal for cost, quality, service improvement, and leadership. She is co-author of the Searching Skills Toolkit, which aims to support health professionals' searching for best quality clinical and non-clinical evidence. Her research interests are health management, commissioning, public health, consumer health information literacy, and knowledge management. She currently works as a Knowledge and Evidence Specialist for Public Health England, and works on the Commissioning Elf in her spare time.

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Health policy decisions are based on experiences rather than high-quality research, according to survey

Research written on blackboard

Introduction People living with chronic disease often have a poor quality of life, and, for the NHS, it results in a significant cost and resource burden, with people facing years of treatment. It makes sense therefore to make sure that health services are run as efficiently as possible, while maintaining or improving levels of quality. [read the full story…]

The role of commissioners in improving the NHS

Fingers 5 4 3 2 1

“Healthcare success in the future will be judged on the quality of outcomes.” From April 2013, improvement in the NHS will be driven by clinical commissioners. The NHS Commissioning Board has published this planning framework with supporting material to help health organisations meet three key objectives: Seamless management of organisational change Capacity-provision for clinical commissioning [read the full story…]

Lean processes for improving blood science services

Test tubes

“A ‘right first time’ approach is encouraged and endorsed by commissioners, clinical teams and users to ensure safety and efficiency.” NHS Improvement has been working closely with the Department of Health and a range of healthcare organisations, testing and implementing improvements with over 250 sites across the country and providing an improvement tool to over [read the full story…]