Photo:Darren Hester, Flickr
Photo:Darren Hester, Flickr
Managing Productivity
Over the next few years, financial pressures facing NHS organisations will increase.
The need for improved productivity and efforts to reduce costs will be important in back office areas as well as in clinical services.
Front line services will need to be re-engineered to deliver high quality care more efficiently. Overall however, healthcare services used by the public will be “relatively” sheltered from spending cuts.
Not so the back office functions which support ront line teams.
The pressure on back office functions has been developing over an extended period. In February 2009, David Nicholson, Chief Executive of the NHS, wrote to NHS trust boards saying -
“Where corporate services are currently retained in-house I would encourage NHS management boards to be clear that the decision to retain them represents better value for money than alternative options such as NHS SBS, or other shared services or outsourcing solutions”
In May 2009, HM Treasury identified the need to improve information about public sector spending on back office operations, recommending -
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- information should be auditable and transparent, allow tracking of spend over time and facilitate comparisons between organisations;
- public sector organisations should sign up to value for money indicators identified by UK audit agencies to benchmark themselves and identify scope for improvement.
The NHS, along with other public sector bodies, has to consider how best to respond in a way that effectively meets those recommendations.
How will you address these issues within your organisation?
Managing Using Metrics
Managers need to know if the organisation’s HR and Payroll functions are delivering high quality services and providing good value for money.
Producing consistent and reliable performance statistics using key metrics provides a reliable source of evidence for management decision-making.
Measurement isn’t without challenges, but is a good starting point.
Effective action to strengthen control, improve quality and cost must rely upon robust data. Organisations routinely measuring business outcomes will observe performance variations. Identifying performance trends and patterns informs successful problem-solving.
Evaluating business contribution is an important management function supporting service delivery and improvement action. Measuring the value of back office functions is often seen as tricky, though, in principle it is not especially difficult. Every organisation is unique, with a particular combination of people, tools, processes and environmental factors. However, they all face similar pressures and challenges and back-office performance metrics “travel” surprisingly well between organisations.
In the absence of meaningful metrics, line managers and the senior team (your key clients) will draw conclusions about the quality of service and value for money based on their “best guess”, which may be influenced unduly by isolated problems or anecdotal evidence.
Benchmarking further supports local performance evaluation with insight on relative strengths and weakness, highlighting attainable standards, pinpointing areas for investigation and improvement action.
Only by comparing existing solutions to alternatives can organisations make well-informed decisions about service design and delivery.
