Summertime salutations. I hope everyone is managing to keep cool!
As regulars will be well aware, this particular newsletter (think tiny leaf floating in a sea of digital content) is inclined towards substantial verbiage. I mean, why use one word when ten will do(!?). However, with so much stuff of actual use and value to say this time, I’m going to ditch the poorly executed attempts at the quarterly vanity published novella (otherwise known as the preamble) and move straight on to the meat (veggie options available) in the missive sandwich.
Updates:
As ever at this time of year, front and centre is Local Government:
May 2023 Local Election updates (not to mention the smattering of MP updates over the past week of course!) have been completed with Leadership and Cabinet and Committee updates are now well underway following AGM’s. It should be noted here that as well as (or perhaps because of) this being the biggest election in the Local Gov cycle, this year saw over 1400 ward changes and nearly 3500 new postholders! – we have a new report on the elections (something we plan to publish annually) which may be of interest – a link to take a look at this is in the ‘New’ section below.
As mentioned in the last edition, April saw the most recent set of Local Council reorganisations. A summary of the changes can now be seen here – As a result of these changes, some organisations, including Care Homes, Local Government (LATCO), Parish Councils, Schools, and Libraries, will have a new parent Council in the live database.
In other news; we’ve recently run an update across GP Practices including GP Patient List sizes. This led to 6349 updates and consequently 109 practices moved up or down our annual spend bandings. We have also run our 6 monthly review of Care Home capacities. This update covered 17,609 homes and led to 422 new values and 1139 updates across spend and capacity bandings.
NHS England and Health Education England have merged creating a single lead NHS organisation in England. This follows the merger earlier in the year of NHS Digital and NHS England. Relevant updates have been made on the database.
Outside of these noteworthy changes, the usual ongoing updates made in the last 90 days courtesy of the hardworking research team are reflected in the table shown below:
New:
As mentioned above we now intend to produce an annual summary and report on each Local Election. The 2023 version is now complete and can be seen here.
Not unrelated to which, we have also recently published a live ‘seat tracker’ which provides monthly tracking of the total number of seats across Local and National Government held by Political Parties.
We have also started a weekly email (called ‘Spotlight’) which summarises changes and updates across the Oscar database each week. You can sign up for free to receive these here.
For those interested in Care Homes (and perhaps in particular their Groups) we have added a chunk of new fields to the database that, if you’re fortunate enough to have a current subscription, can be added into your subscriptions (cue a conversation with your Account Manager).
These include:
Care Home Groups – Number of Homes
Count of the number of homes that are part of the group
Care Home Groups – Specialisms
A series of fields providing a count of homes by specialism across all the group homes
Interesting:
This time, it’s more us being interested in what you’re interested in in order to complete the interesting section (or something like that). We would very much value your input on our customer, client and general acquaintance survey – something we’ve called “Public Services and You”. The results are perfectly anonymous, we promise not to pester you thereafter and, perhaps most importantly, takes about 2 minutes and for which we will donate £20 to GOSH (Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity) for every completed submission.
Please do have a look as we genuinely value your feedback and your ideas may well shape our ongoing development
In Closing – it seemed noteworthy to mention that May saw our 7 millionth article view. So a massive thank you to the editorial team, our contributors and readers alike! – all our articles can be seen on the Oscar article hub here.
That wraps it up until September, so until then here’s to another lovely summer.
James and team at Oscar
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