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The NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement have been working with organisations from across the NHS to co-design resources that are useful and usable in the development of organisational values and alignment with the national values in The NHS Constitution. The Values Development Resource,developed by the NHS, for the NHS, that can help organisations to start to develop and embed their own local values is now available.

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) this week published The State of Care, a report that sets out how well health care and social care services in England performed in 2009, and the improvements leading up to 2009. This year's report is the first time that CQC can give a complete picture of health care and adult social care in England "“ including how well the two sectors work together.

The aim of the review was to propose an evidence based strategy for reducing health inequalities from 2010. The strategy includes policies and interventions that address the social determinants of health inequalities. The review had a number of tasks, including identifying health inequalities challenges and showing how evidence could be translated into practice.

This paper is a joint report from the University of Birmingham, In Control and The Centre for Welfare Reform. It discusses the background to personal budgets in social care and introduces the concept of them as 'Conditional Resource Entitlements' (CREs) - a means of targeting resources towards those who are eligible, but with specific conditions attached. The authors suggest personal budgets can form part of a wider strategy for welfare reform which places emphasis on promoting citizenship and personal responsibility.

Quality has been at the centre of recent NHS policy, and the NHS Next Stage Review highlighted the role of information and measurement in supporting quality improvement, particularly in relation to patient safety, clinical effectiveness and patient experience. Getting the Measure of Quality, a Kings Fund publication, offers information about how quality is defined and how quality measures can be used "“ and misused. It sets out the main debates and choices faced by those involved in measuring and using data on quality and outlines some practical issues to be considered in choosing and using quality measures.