Meeting Targets or Meeting Needs
Meeting performance targets are a major concern to health care trusts around the country. Failing trusts lose staff, funding and confidence. But are targets helping trusts to improve or are they pressuring them to fail?
Patient care has suffered repeatedly because of poor management and bureaucracy in the NHS, according to a report by the healthcare watchdog.
A lack of leadership, inadequate team-working and focusing too much on government targets emerged as common themes in the Healthcare Commission’s review of its 13 major investigations between 2004 and 2007. It concluded that some boards were focused on mergers between organisations after a shake-up of NHS trusts, or on meeting targets at the expense of patient care.
Taken from The Times Online article by David Rose, Feb 4th 2008
Our own After Sunday Panel have also addressed this issue :
Targets and budgets, while essential to the smooth running of the organisation, seem to interfere with the delivery of a caring service to vulnerable people who cannot be easily fitted into standard slots of 'care'. Where do the loyalties of a Christian worker lie? (Question from Liz Rankin)
Our panel's responses to this question have raised several common themes. On the whole, they see positive aspects to target setting and budgets. Peter Shaw states, "Targets are there for the best possible reasons so that there is clear accountability and so taxpayer's money is used in the best possible way." Jennifer Barraclough has direct experience of the positive impact of setting clear targets and expectations in her Quaker organisation, "We have recovered from a situation of impending closure to become a dynamic and active establishment once more." This, after changing over the last few years to a more target and budget orientated approach. Ann Loades also highlights benefits of responsible target setting, "Targets and budgets may sharpen the focus, define the limits of what can and cannot be achieved in respect of intractable and unmanageable conditions, and can help protect those employed from being expected to deliver the impossible, even if resources were limitless, which they are not.".All members of our panel concur with the view that where target setting is used responsibly and appropriately, it can be a source of encouragement, "We find that clarity and encouragement in working with targets and budgets goes a long way to helping colleagues enjoy the process" (Jennifer Barraclough)
A note of caution is however sounded, where targets are used not as a tool for improvement and encouragement, but as a way of assigning fault. Peter Shaw says, "We can influence and encourage others but castigating them or blaming them when they have tried to act responsibly is not a proper demonstration of Christian love in the workplace!" Bill Allen recognises that some Christians may feel an immense strain, " The gap between what I believe and value and what I have to do can sometimes seem so great that there is no alternative but to seek other employment" although he goes on to say that in more effective organisations staff can "seek to find ways to influence the environment in which they work through appropriate structures of staff consultation." David Clough makes the same point and goes on, "Occasionally, there may be times when secretly departing from agreed policy could be justified, but particularly where this involves deception, Christians should be extremely cautious at the very least. In any case such covert action promises less in the long term than working for the reform of bad systems."
By means of advice to the Christian worker faced with dilemmas such as these, Bill Allen writes, "Above all else, one must be true to oneself and to one's beliefs and values, rooted as they are in one's Christian faith and experience."
The Bishop of Jarrow states that lives are not ultimately measurable by utility, finance or statistics. "Of course there is a place for targets as a useful organisational discipline, but they must always be secondary to the value of human lives." He quotes "It's people, not statistics, that bleed.'
How do you see targets? Are they a help or a hinderance? Do you agree that targets are necessary? Let us know your experiences and views.
What are your experience of performance targets?
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