Trust-wide Benchmarking Exercise
22/11/2009
Green & Kassab have recently completed a benchmarking exercise for an acute NHS Trust in the Midlands. The exercise was requested to support the Trust’s Foundation Trust application following on from some issues that were raised by Monitor concerning the level of resource in some areas of the Trust.
The benchmarking exercise covered all of the Trust’s revenue budget lines, clinical, support and corporate services. The review process involved the Trust in providing Green & Kassab with key performance, financial and qualitative data, which was benchmarked against our database of approximately 130 Trusts.
Structured interviews were conducted with the key service managers across the Trust in order to ensure that our Consultant team gained a good understanding of the services being provided. It is vitally important that any comparative analysis is based on like for like comparisons as it is not unusual for the range of service provision to vary significantly from Trust to Trust. Our team also examined the wider performance issues of the Trust in order to ensure that low service costs in one particular area were not unduly affecting performance elsewhere within the Trust.
In order to further enhance our understanding of the value for money position, our Consultant team sought to establish a good understanding of the quality of service being provided by each service. As well as reviewing the latest audit reports, reviews and patient satisfaction surveys, our team undertook some direct observations of the service quality, with the assistance of the client team, when required.
Having established a suitable understanding of the service provision at the Trust, the levels of service being provided, the costs and quality of these services, our team will then undertook comparisons of this performance with that of other Trusts. Adjustments to the comparator information was made to ensure a like for like comparison and so that the results were presented to the Trust in its own “currency”.
Our team analysed the performance of each service against a range of differing performance metrics, as this enabled a better overall picture to be formed. Typically, we were able to provide 5-6 significant individual metrics for each budget centre.
As a consequence of the benchmarking exercise the Trust were able to satisfy the requirements of Monitor and confirm areas where additional investments were required as well as identifying areas of potential cost improvement for the future.
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