LSE Principal Investigator: Andrew Street
Start Date: 01 May 2018
End Date: 31 August 2022
Regions: Europe
Countries: UK
Keywords: Management, NHS, hospital performance, data, efficiency, productivity
Little is known about the impact of NHS management on hospital performance. This is partly due to a lack of specific management data being available within the NHS. This project aims to identify and analyse routinely available data to address this issue. This will entail defining managerial tasks within the NHS, differentiating mangment skills across the sector andthen assessing the impact that differential NHS management practices have on hospital performance.
Analyses will be collected to assess the relationship between management on a range of performance measures, thereby yielding insight into managerial contributions andoptimal managerial inputs. The project will highlight gaps in our knowledge about NHS management that might be addressed by future primary data collection.
The last published article to use routine data to explore the relationship between NHS management and hospital performance was published almost twenty years ago (Street et al 1999), but subsequent studies have been few and far between. This is despite the fact that NHS productivity improvements, targets and incentive schemes all rely heavily on efficient management for their delivery. We know of only one recent studywhich has used survey data (Bloom et al, 2015) to investigate NHS hospital management and its relationship to competitative market pressures, and no recent studies that have used routinely available data to investigate management issues. Neither have the various forms of NHS management been fully defined, let alone assessed.