Health Sciences

Exploring and explaining variation in activity rates of hospital consultants: generating and testing hypotheses about the determinants of consultant productivity in the English NHS

Hospital consultants are key decision makers in the teams that provide healthcare in the NHS. Over recent years, there have been large increases in NHS expenditure, particularly on staff salaries. Along with this, there has been increasing awareness of returns on spending, and the ‘productivity’ of health care organisations and staff. In this programme of work, we aim to inform the future development of medical workforce policy and practice by analysing data on activity rates of individual hospital consultants over time, and exploring why there are variations in productivity and factors that facilitate and inhibit productivity. In particular, a ten year panel of data on activity rates of consultants will be constructed and analysed, to determine trends over time, individual and organisational factors contributing to productivity and the impact of policy changes including the new consultant contract. Other information, such as that from consultant job plans and hospital staff surveys, will be linked with the panel of data where possible. This will then be supplemented with a questionnaire survey of hospital consultants and a series of qualitative interviews, both further exploring a range of individual and organisational characteristics and the working lives of consultants.