Recent public policy and service development initiatives in the UK have sought to address the gap between knowledge and practice.
The online Toolkit also includes resources from previous service development initiatives, such as job descriptions and clinical tools, which can be customised and reused in new service developments.
Palliative care has been proposed to help meet the needs of patients who suffer progressive non-cancer conditions but there have been few evaluations of service development initiatives.
Through the methods that have been developed and implemented, a large-scale and growing databank has been successfully established for research and service development initiatives, whilst complying with the requirements of Information Governance.
Within this service model development initiative, 51 AHA trial positions were established at the three levels (Table 2).
This cross-sectional retrospective documentation survey was part of the Youth Outreach for Diabetes (YOuR-Diabetes) project, an Australian National Health and Medical Research Council funded service development and evaluation initiative for young adults with type 1 diabetes in the Hunter New England (HNE) and Lower Mid-North Coast region of NSW.
Hughes et al. [ 34] undertook a series of focus groups with midwives to improve the understanding of factors affecting midwifery morale and how to enhance engagement of midwives in key strategic service planning and service re-development initiatives.
Service user engagement in planned service revision is clearly important for maternity service development within a QI initiative as women may highlight areas for change which clinicians and managers may not necessarily have deemed a priority.
These can, for example, help to understand and explain causal links and pathways resulting from a new policy initiative or service development (see Tables 2 and 3, for example)[ 1].
In research, the conceptually-related case study approach can be used, for example, to describe in detail a patient's episode of care, explore professional attitudes to and experiences of a new policy initiative or service development or more generally to 'investigate contemporary phenomena within its real-life context'[ 1].
