Experts respond to new NHS standard measures
The government has set out how NHS standards are likely to be measured in future, with a focus on how well treatments and care are working for patients.
Health secretary Andrew Lansley wants the NHS to focus on “outcome goals”, which he says will enable patients, the public and Parliament to hold him to account for the performance of the health service.
He has pledged to scrap NHS targets which have no “clinical justification”, but the government has denied the new proposals are just a new set of targets.
Catherine Foot, a senior fellow at the King’s Fund, said much of the data around outcomes was collected already and it was positive that the framework was taking into account existing measures.
She said the UK was “far and away” better than many other countries when it comes to collecting health data but there was a strong case for collecting and publishing more.
She said the framework appeared to show that local bodies would be collecting data and measuring the performance of the NHS, rather than it all going through central government.
Ms Foot highlighted one problem with measuring outcomes in the way the government wants to: there can be a long period between a patient being treated on the NHS and their “outcome”.
Outcomes can also be affected by things that are not entirely under NHS control, making them difficult to measure, she said.
Cancer survival rates, for example, are affected by many variables, including social deprivation.
Jo Webber, deputy director of policy at NHS Confederation, said: “There is a strong argument for measuring the quality of treatment and the results achieved for patients, rather than more crude process measures, but these kinds of measures can be complex and, of course, also require administration and management.
“However the NHS is run and governed, it will always need some form of measurement of its performance to ensure patients are being cared for properly and the taxpayer is getting value for money.
“These kinds of outcome measures have the advantage of being based on the experiences of patients and the current process of consultation will be a crucial part of ensuring they are as accurate and useful as possible.”
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Readers' comments (7)
Anonymous | 20-Jul-2010 12:35 pm
Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.
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mike batt | 20-Jul-2010 3:28 pm
Say: "outcome goals, outcome goals, outcome goals", NOT "targets".
Can't wait to collect and report more data. Although I am glad to say that collecting and reporting data on these new "outcome goals" can easily be accomplished by good old doctors nad nurses (the angels) and not bureaucratic red tape merchants like those nasty old labour targets.
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Bruce Pollington | 20-Jul-2010 5:12 pm
Having been an exponent of outcome measures for some years I am all for it. The consultation document shows a lot of thought and effort has been made to address the collection of outcome, which is clearly going to be more complicated than some of the targets collected in the past. Fortunately there is already quite a lot of outcome already measured.
I do not believe this is just about performance monitoring, I hope that this will become an iterative learning process from which we can continually learn and improve the service offering. Just as we seek to provide clinical care based on evidence we should commission services based on evidence. What better evidence is there then the outcome of the care?
I want to provide a service with satisfied customers.
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Rob Brittlebank | 20-Jul-2010 5:55 pm
Measuring healthcare success against outcome measures is logical, if a challenge to practicality. And given the long lead time of many interventions, is there any guarantee that these defined 'measures' will still be current in, say, 5 or 10 years time for making meaningfull comparisons?
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Roy Lilley | 20-Jul-2010 10:40 pm
we could be doing the wrong thing for a long time before someone realises..........
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Anonymous | 21-Jul-2010 12:53 pm
One would hope that if pathways are designed or approved by clinicians and outcomes defined by clinicians (not commissioners) and public health, we should be on the right track most of the time...
The challenge will be the one mentioned above, that outcomes will change over time and we need a simple means of translating or subsuming old into new.
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Anonymous | 21-Jul-2010 2:09 pm
Surely Ron you are not so cynical to notice that the time taken to set up the new systems combined with long term outcomes followed by the data collection and processing lag means that it will after the next election before any of the impact of current changes will be reportable to parliament and the public!
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