Measuring success in the NHS
Posted on 29 March 2004
The latest issue of Health Policy Matters from the University of York focuses on this question. "The fundamental purpose of the NHS is not to get more patients into the system" said author Paul Kind, "It is to make people healthier. For the bulk of NHS activities we know nothing about what they contribute to this basic objective.""More than 100 years ago Florence Nightingale described patients who left her care according to a simple classification of outcomes - relieved / unrelieved / dead. When it comes to measuring outcome in today's NHS we struggle to achieve even that level of sophistication." "Performance indicators tell us little or nothing about outcomes. More is not necessarily better. We need to know which of the NHS's activities contribute most to the health of the population and which contribute little or nothing."
The message from this issue of Health Policy Matters is that it is perfectly feasible to collect key data about the impact of treatment from patients themselves.
Authors Paul Kind and Alan Williams demonstrate how a well-validated measure of health related quality of life could be used to track changes in the health status of patients before and after treatment.
"It is time to abandon inappropriate measures of activity and failure in the NHS and use measures that demonstrate the success of the Service in terms of how it produces health gain for patients" said Paul Kind.
Notes to editors:
- The authors are Paul Kind, Principal Investigator, Outcomes Research Group, Centre for Health Economics, University of York (pk1@york.ac.uk) and Alan Williams, Professor of Economics, University of York.
- Full text of Health Policy Matters is on the web at www.york.ac.uk/healthsciences/pubs/hpmindex.htm. Further details about EQ5D can be found on www.euroqol.org
- Health Policy Matters is distributed free of charge to chairs, chief executives, senior managers in the health and social services sectors in England.
- The University of York is one of the world's leading providers of health related research and education. Four teaching departments and five research centres focused on health have earned the University a world-wide reputation.