Your local needs are our driving force
Are you looking for an effective way of bringing colleagues together to understand more about the trust's relative performance and to discover potential avenues for improvement?
Our new mental health benchmarking service brings you our unrivalled market knowledge to help you move ahead.
Key features:
- Tailored - the focus is driven by you
- Robust - helps you build knowledge, evidence and data
- Interactive - workshop format builds ownership and understanding
- Expertise - our facilitators are experienced in mental health issues
- Tangible outcomes - helps you pinpoint specific improvement actions.
'This flexible and tailored approach to benchmarking has significant potential for our organisation and for other mental health trusts; we have used the benchmarking exercise to identify current strengths and weaknesses in our performance.
'We have been able to make good use of the existing range of data and anticipate being able to use it yet more effectively in the future, by developing further indicators, and by being able to track improvements'
Duncan Smith, Deputy Chief Executive and Director of Finance, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust
How does it work?
The priorities for benchmarking are discussed with the trust’s senior management, typically the chief executive and finance director. We examine together the data that is available and identify the indicators that it would be useful to analyse.
A single workshop or series of workshops is facilitated by a team of Trust Practice specialists. This gives the chance for the trust to bring together all the relevant people within the trust to look at the results.
It is highly interactive with participants encouraged to address and investigate the findings for themselves. This paves the way for follow up and any change management programme that needs to be undertaken.
What does it cover?
Benchmarking allows you to look at:
- Spend
Variations and trends in spend per head of population. - Variations in health versus local government spend
- Economy
Are trusts achieving value for money in the inputs to their services?
- Efficiency
Are trusts making efficient use of the inputs to the service?
The types of data that it can examine include accounts and trust financial returns; reference costs; service mapping and financial mapping by care group; medical staffing numbers; and activity data such as length of stay, readmissions and did not attend (DNA) rates.
What can it be used for?
It can be used in a variety of ways: to help the trust decide key indicators and use data more effectively to manage performance; to provide a map that can guide the trust to prioritise management action; or to zero in on areas that are already on your priority agenda.
What are the benefits?
By looking at variations in cost, activity and service delivery, mental health trusts are in a stronger position to:
- develop robust cost improvement plans as part of the FT application process
- develop performance frameworks
- have a clearer understanding of the links between activity and cost or resource allocation to inform contracting and preparation for Payment by Results (PbR)
- understand the impact of changes to service delivery.
How do I find out more?
Contact your Trust Practice auditor or the regional lead for your area:
- Jon Hayes, London - Tel: 0844 798 7092
- Simon Garlick, Southern England - Tel: 0844 798 1741
- Rob Murray, Central England - Tel: 0844 798 5777
- Damian Murray, Northern England - Tel: 0844 798 6620
- Catherine Mitchell, Trust Practice Mental Health Lead - Tel: 0844 798 4627
All can be emailed at: tpe@audit-commission.gov.uk