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This paper considers the eligibility criteria for NHS continuing healthcare funding in England ‐ with particular focus on the revised framework guidance issued by the Department of Health in July 2009. It commences with a brief review of the tensions that exist between the guidance and the law (in the form of court judgments) and provides an overview of the aspects of the guidance of most relevance to those working with disabled people with severe head and spinal injuries.The paper advises how professionals involved in this difficult area should interpret the new materials so as to reach an outcome in individual cases that is in accordance with the law. It suggests, however, that even with the July 2009 revisions, the framework and the associated decision support tool remain problematic.The paper concludes with a cautionary note, that the recent increase in the numbers of patients qualifying for NHS continuing healthcare funding may be attributable, not to the detail of the framework, but to the Department of Health's rhetoric of change and the additional monies that it has made available to primary care trusts (PCTs) for this sector.

As promised in the previous article (Continuing Health Care ‐ the story so far…) this article considers some specific issues in relation to people being cared for at home and in relation to children.

This special issue emphasises how the ‘whole system’ of care is becoming even more complex. With the pending implementation of the Community Care (Delayed Discharges etc) Act 2003, there are pressures on strategic health authorities and local councils to reach agreement on eligibility criteria for continuing health care. But in the wake of a special report from the Health Service Ombudsman, there is still plenty of room for debate about the lawfulness of the criteria.

This is the first in a series of articles looking at continuing health care (CHC). This article will look at the historical background and key legal judgments which have influenced decision making on eligibility for CHC. Future articles will look at the current position under the frameworks in England and Wales and consider some specific issues in relation to people being cared for at home and in relation to children.

This paper situates a large‐scale learning and service development capacity‐building initiative for hospice palliative care services within the current Canadian policy context for use by international readers.

In 2000 a national initiative using action research as its design was crafted to support continuing professional development and knowledge management in primary‐health care environments.

The Canadian health policy context is complex and requires innovative solutions to achieve desired changes in response to emerging population health demands for quality end‐of‐life care. Employment of educational and social science constructs, including complexity theory, communities of practice, transformative learning theory, and workplace learning methods, has proven helpful in supporting the creation of national capacity for hospice palliative care.

There is a significant contribution for social scientists to make in aiding a better understanding of the complexity in health systems. At the same time, an aging population in industrial countries demands more active engagement of legal and bioethical scholars in a range of emerging policy and legislative questions about quality end‐of‐life care. Educational research is also required to understand better and reform curricula to prepare an emerging generation of health science practitioners for the demands of an aging population.

Changing health service delivery environments demand rethinking of the knowledge and skills leaders require to influence desired change. A broader understanding of where and how learning takes place is essential for enhancing the quality of patient care.

The Pallium Project represents a generative response to facilitating learning and building longer‐term system capacity. The journey of project development to date illustrates some important lessons that can be adopted from hospice palliative care to inform other primary‐health care initiatives, including, potentially, mental health, cardiology, diabetes, geriatrics, where productive change can result from productively linking specialists and primary‐care colleagues.

The study aims to examine the role of health-care supply chain management during the COVID-19 pandemic in a cross-section of 42 selected sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries.

The study used cross-sectional robust least square regression for parameter estimates.

The results confirmed the N-shaped relationship between the health-care logistics performance index (HLPI) and COVID-19 cases. It implies that initially HLPI increases along with an increase in COVID-19 cases. Later down, it decreases COVID-19 cases by providing continued access to medical devices and personal protective equipment. Again, it increases due to resuming economic activities across countries.

The continuing health-care supply chain is crucial to minimize COVID-19 cases. The international support from the developed world in providing health-care equipment, debt resettlement and resolving regional conflicts is deemed desirable to escape the SSA countries from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The importance of the health-care supply chain during the COVID-19 pandemic is evident in the forecasting estimates, which shows that from August 2021 to April 2022, increasing the health-care supply chain at their third-degree level would reduce coronavirus registered cases. The results conclude that SSA countries required more efforts to contain coronavirus cases by thrice increasing their health-care logistics supply chain.

This paper reviews evidence about the relationships between NHS services and nursing and residential homes in England and Wales. Since the transfer in 1993 of responsibility for funding nursing and residential home care for less affluent older people to local authority social services departments, nursing and residential care has been widely assumed to constitute part of ‘social care’ services. This obscures the fact that residents of nursing and residential care homes frequently have substantial and complex healthcare needs. While some of these healthcare needs may be met through the care provided within homes themselves, most will require substantial contributions from NHS medical, nursing, pharmaceutical and other services. The National Service Framework for Older People (Department of Health, 2001) prioritises reinvestment in intermediate care services, building on the expectation in The NHS Plan (Department of Health, 2000a) that residential and nursing homes will play a major role in the development of these services. This expectation has been further reinforced by the Concordat with the private and voluntary healthcare provider sector (Department of Health, 2000b). However there is little evidence about the NHS services which are currently provided to nursing and residential homes, nor about the capacity of mainstream NHS services to meet the projected development of intermediate care services within the independent institutional sector. This paper reviews the evidence which is available and highlights some of the priorities which primary care groups in England (local health groups in Wales) will need to consider if they are to develop integrated and good quality services for frail older people.