2 General findings of the Consistency Panel

District Health Boards: Learning from 2010–2013 Statements of Intent.

After reviewing auditors’ grades for DHBs’ service performance information (and associated systems and controls), the results were:

  • Needs improvement – 12 DHBs. The five DHBs discussed in this paper stood out as having made good progress.
  • Poor – 8 DHBs.

The Consistency Panel considered nine factors, set out in Table 1, to be particularly important.

Table 1: Key factors assessed when reviewing the 2010–13 SOIs

  • There is a coherent performance story, including a clear and logical performance framework
  • There are specific, high-level health outcomes for the district’s population, main measures and targets (for the period of the SOI)
  • There are clearly identifiable impacts, and measures and targets for them*
  • There are outcomes/impacts that are successfully differentiated from services (outputs)
  • There are services that are identified and clearly and appropriately described
  • There is sufficient coverage of significant services demonstrated in the (forecast) Statement of Service Performance (SSP)
  • The important dimensions of performance for those significant services are identified
  • There is a number of measures of service quality (that is, "pure" measures rather than impact measures, which can indirectly indicate service quality)
  • There are baselines, trends, and other information to allow for meaningful comparisons

* Although not required by the Crown Entities Act, the presentation of measures for both outcomes and impacts can enhance the performance information.

The Consistency Panel’s general observations were that most DHBs had made notable improvements in their 2010-13 SOIs, compared with the previous year. It found that:

"For those DHBs the Panel considers are making good progress, a major factor is their apparent understanding of the difference between outputs and impacts/outcomes, the clear separation of these in their intervention logic models, and the avoidance of confusing one with the other either in the framework or in the measures attached to them (i.e. measures of service delivery are attached to outputs and true impact measures are attached to impacts).

Those DHBs that have made only little or some progress are still grappling with basic performance framework issues."

However, the Consistency Panel found that all DHBs still needed to:

  • ensure that the DHB’s most significant services were properly covered; and
  • report more measures of service quality.
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