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NHS bosses expect quality of care to fall

The recent survey from the NHS Confederation, which shows that NHS bosses expect quality of care to fall, raises important questions about how trusts make decisions on where to make cost savings.

To achieve significant efficiency gains, trusts need to be armed with the right information. Some hospitals will already know where their inefficiencies lie. They will have reviewed their inpatient and outpatient activity, assessed theatre utilisation, prescribing, staffing levels and many other factors. They will have collated and analysed the information and be monitoring how their cost improvement programmes are affecting quality of patient care. More trusts need to adopt this evidence-based approach.

Many services will be running efficiently already and providing good quality care. To find the real opportunities to make savings – rather than arbitrarily top-slicing budgets across all departments – trusts must use their data.

The long-awaited Information Strategy finally puts data at centre-stage. The trusts which are using their information effectively have found that it has empowered clinicians and managers to take ownership of their performance. This has yielded improvements in their financial position as well as fostering a culture of collective participation in determining the future targets and actions needed to achieve them.

Although it is mandatory for healthcare organisations to make significant efficiency savings, the decisions on how to fulfil these requirements successfully needs to be based on the evidence – evidence that is available in every trust if only they can get to it quickly and easily. This will allow them to start fixing the problems and leave well-run departments to continue running efficiently, without jeopardising the level of patient care that healthcare professionals are providing.

Paul Fitzsimmons is managing director of MedeAnalytics. 

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