During the summer of 2005, acute, specialist, ambulance, mental health and primary care trusts (PCTs) in England will receive performance ratings (star ratings), assessing their performance during the year ending March 31st 2005.
The Healthcare Commission will conduct this assessment and government ministers retain responsibility for setting overall priorities for the NHS, which in turn determines key targets and certain performance indicators included in the performance ratings.
Performance indicators are information collected to show how health trusts are doing in relation to some of the main targets set by the Government for the NHS, as well as other broader measures of performance. They include information from surveys of staff and patients, and other measures useful to patients and carers.
This year, for the first time, the Healthcare Commission published the list of key target indicators and technical specifications (constructions) before the start of the financial year being assessed.
Please direct any queries to the performance indicator mailbox: performance.indicators@healthcarecommission.org.uk
This website holds lists of all the indicators that will be used to calculate the 2005 ratings, including details of why the indicator is included, the data source and the period of time assessed by the indicator.
The technical specifications (constructions) for all of the key targets and all of the balanced scorecard indicators for each organisation type are available through the indicator links on the left hand side of this page.
Combined trusts (those that provide services in mental health as well as acute or primary care) need to refer to the indicator lists for both trust types and will be performance rated in all sectors (acute and mental health and ambulance, or primary care and mental health).
Unlike last year, the three specialist learning disability trusts will not be assessed as part of the 2005 performance ratings. The ratings published for these trusts in 2003 were based on a limited subset of the mental health key targets and performance indicators, as no specific learning disability performance indicators were available. The Healthcare Commission is working on the development of suitable indicators, and has included new indicators on learning disability in both the PCT and mental health provider sets, however these are not sufficient to permit a robust assessment to be made of the performance of specialist learning disability trusts and further indicators will not be available in time for the assessment of performance in 2005.
In February 2005, the Healthcare Commission made the decision to exclude the assessment scores from all clinical governance reviews (or the follow up of action plans, where more appropriate) from the performance ratings for all organisations in 2004/2005. This decision reflects feedback received from strategic health authorities and trusts. The Healthcare Commission continues to support the importance of clinical governance and this is reflected in the core standards assessment that will form part of the annual review of trusts in 2006 and beyond.
The current NHS performance ratings system for 2003/2004 placed NHS trusts in England into one of four categories:
Where a trust has a low rating based on poor performance on a number of key targets and indicators, this does not necessarily mean that a hospital is unsafe, does not contain some very good clinical services or that the staff are not working hard in often difficult circumstances. It does mean that performance must be improved in a number of key areas.
A zero star trust is one, which either fails against the key targets or is considered to have significant areas of weakness for clinical governance.
A three star trust is one that does well on the indicators and, if a review has been undertaken, is considered to have significant strengths for clinical governance.
There is a commitment to reduce the burden to trusts relating to demands on them during, and the time taken up when, data collections are made. The Healthcare Commission aims where possible to use data from existing, mandatory data collections for the purpose of ratings. Last year there were a number of special data collections, but this year we are keeping these to a minimum and are only including a special collection where there is no alternative.
Please direct any queries to the performance indicator mailbox: performance.indicators@healthcarecommission.org.uk