Pretty wild that, in a system where we say there is a “productivity crisis” in hospitals and we don’t really understand what is causing it, we think we can centrally produce league tables and sack the managers of the organisations at the bottom. - ThreadSky

policysketch.bsky.social • 106 days ago

Pretty wild that, in a system where we say there is a “productivity crisis” in hospitals and we don’t really understand what is causing it, we think we can centrally produce league tables and sack the managers of the organisations at the bottom.

Reposted from Andy Cowper

NHS league tables.

Again.

Sigh.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

“Half a league table, half a league table, half a league table onward,
Into the valley of the shadow of career death
Rode the six hundred.”

(With apologies to Alfred Tennyson.)

Comments

sheilab01.bsky.social•105 days ago

You'd think they'd learn from the carnage this approach has wreked in education.

agaland2dogs.bsky.social•106 days ago

Actually it suggests an appalling misapprehension re: the situation in which the NHS finds itself. Making people run faster, work longer hours, cut corners, whatever, will just wear everyone down further.

dsquareddigest.bsky.social•106 days ago

brilliant, we are reinventing rank and yank, the management system which brought so much success to general electric

policysketch.bsky.social•106 days ago

If we could codify what managers should be doing well enough to put it in league tables, then we wouldn’t need that layer of management at all. And by pretending we can codify and centralise “performance”, we are wasting the potential of that layer of management to manage complexity.

policysketch.bsky.social•106 days ago

As you have said elsewhere, this comes from the system not believing in the ability of its people to do their job.

dunnoreally.bsky.social•105 days ago

The Trust’s culture was one of self promotion rather than critical analysis and openness. This can be seen from the way the Trust approached its FT application, its approach to high Hospital Standardised Mortality Ratios (HSMRs) and inaccurate self declaration of its own performance -Francis Report

policysketch.bsky.social•105 days ago

Yep and we can pin it all on one trust and say it was a bad egg, or we can recognise that in a system that constantly demands false assurance we are creating a situation where this will happen by default unless senior managers are willing to stick their necks out and effectively blow the whistle.

euantaylor.bsky.social•106 days ago

Positive reinforcement?

Nah, sack the slackers!

PS we can't tell who is a slacker or someone doing a good job in bad circumstances!

dazwright.com•106 days ago

I hope that someone mentioned that every other time we've tried some variation of this "sack" actually means paying someone a lot of money to go away.

marshajdavid.bsky.social•106 days ago

Why are we using language like this? First “efficiency”, now “productivity” and all that it entails, taking us away from where our core focus should be - on the patient.

andredarmanin.bsky.social•105 days ago

The exact reason I hate I when govt agencies talk this language. They are only focused on process and not users. There is only so much you can slice a penny.

duncanrobertson.bsky.social•106 days ago

In order to sack said managers, we first need to recruit a Rankings Manager.

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