Hospital productivity growth in the English NHS 2008/09 to 2013/14

Posted on 21 October 2016

CHE's latest Research Paper 138 written by María José Aragón, Adriana Castelli, Martin Chalkley and James Gaughan

Paper 138 cover

This report is concerned with the extent to which NHS hospital Trusts make better use of resources over time by increasing the number of patients they treat and the services they deliver for the same or fewer inputs.

The ratio of all outputs to all inputs is termed Total Factor Productivity (TFP) and growth in TFP is vital to achieving patient care with increasingly limited resources.

Measures of TFP for the NHS as a whole are well-established but any aggregate measure may reflect a diversity of experience and performance across individual Trusts.

In this report we extend earlier studies to determine whether measures of TFP growth at the level of individual Trusts can establish consistently high performers - Trusts that habitually exhibit above average TFP growth.

This work is potentially important because it may establish a benchmark figure for high performance and thus enable setting realistic targets for efficiency savings, and identify Trusts that are exemplars of good performance so that others can learn from their practices and methods.

Full Report: CHE Research Paper 138 (PDF , 2,652kb)

Other papers in the CHE Research paper series can be found at: In house publications