Our performance department, part of EPUT’s business analysis and reporting directorate, is responsible for ensuring that we continue to be one of the country’s leading mental health and community health service providers. The performance department is also responsible for making sure that the whole Trust meets national standards and targets set by the Department of Health.
Trust overall performance
One of the recommendations of the 2013 Francis Inquiry into failings at Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust was that NHS trusts should be be more transparent and share true and factual information about how well they are performing with staff and the public. To achieve this, we have developed a set of board of directors’ scorecards.
Board of directors’ scorecards
We developed the scorecards to give people using our services, their families and carers – and anyone else who has an interest in our services – the opportunity to see how well we’re performing. The scorecards highlight:
- Areas where we are performing well
- Areas where performance needs to be improved
- Our performance against our annual quality priorities
The areas that are assessed will change in line with Trust’s annual quality priorities, and to reflect any change to how well we should perform against local or national targets.
Public quality dashboard
Our performance targets are set by our board of directors, and by external organisations, such as local Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), local authority partners and NHS Improvement.
Each year our board of directors approves a performance framework for the Trust that includes target levels of performance across the entire range of the organisation’s activities; from front line customer care; to the efficiency of back office functions; to the well-being of staff. Our governance arrangements ensure that performance against agreed targets are monitored and reviewed each month by our senior management and executive teams. Our board of directors are notified about anything that might cause concern.
The targets that have been agreed by our board are then monitored at inpatient ward, community team and individual consultant level. In addition to these targets, managers at the Trust monitor local trends and measure the other work that we do to compare how well our services are performing.
As with other NHS trusts, our services are commissioned (or ‘bought’) through service level agreements (SLA) with local CCGs and specialist commissioners. After CCGs and commissioners establish that an NHS service is needed, they then set out in a SLA the amount of activity (e.g. how many times we should see people face to face) that we must provide, in addition to quality standards (e.g. how long people should expect to wait to be seen) for each service. Activity is recorded and sent in a report to the CCGs. These monthly reports compare the levels of activity that have been planned to the actual activity that has taken place, and highlight any areas of concern.
Three local authorities have Section 75 Partnership Agreements in place with us. Each year we negotiate and agree performance targets with them for each nationally-defined social care indicator. Every month we report how well we perform against these targets to the local authorities in a performance framework.