Annual Reports
NAO: The National Audit Office has recently published a report highlighting key trends & variations in the delivery of healthcare across the 4 nations of the UK. The report finds that, despite the shared history & similarities between the 4 nations, there are considerable variations in areas such as health outcomes, spending, staffing & quality.
NAO: Fewer businesses felt that the overall level of regulation in the UK was an obstacle to their business success compared with 3 years ago, a survey conducted on behalf of the National Audit Office, the Better Regulation Executive and the Better Regulation Delivery Office has found. Nevertheless, there is still work to be done in demonstrating to businesses that government understands their needs and is able to consult meaningfully with business on regulation & enforcement more widely.
HMIC: Police forces have risen to the financial challenge, cutting their spending while largely maintaining the service they provide the public; but HM Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) has some concerns about how long this will last, as there are gaps in 1 force’s plans, and most need to transform their efficiency in preparation for future spending reviews, a report published yesterday has found.
Socitm: The 'Funding outlook for councils from 2010/11 to 2019/20', published by the Local Government Association, makes an important contribution to the growing debate over the future of public services in the UK. Socitm welcomes the report & supports its key finding, a funding gap of some £16.5bn by 2019/20. .
Socitm: What issues are uppermost in the council chief executive's mind, and to what extent does ICT strategy support the organisation's overall direction? asks the latest briefing from Socitm Insight. The briefing acknowledges that a ‘disconnect can exist between the chief executive's ideas and the strategy pursued by the technology function’.
In order to illustrate how ICT strategies can be joined up with corporate strategies, the briefing examines chief executives' top 5 current preoccupations and, for each of these issues, the briefing sets out a range of supporting activity & expertise available from ICT professionals and the council's ICT function.
HEFCE: The Higher Education Funding Council Englandand the Office for Fair Access (OFFA) have published a joint report on their monitoring of widening participation strategic assessments & access agreements for 2010-11.
SOCA: SOCA's Annual Report and Accounts for the financial year 2011/12 was published recently.
HPA: The number of drug resistant cases of TB continues to rise with 431 reports in 2011, up from 342 in 2010 – an increase of 26%. Drug resistant TB, when a patient fails to respond to 1 of the 4 main antibiotics used to treat the infection, accounted for 8.4% of laboratory confirmed TB cases in 2011 (431 out of 5,127).
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