Amnis offers help to those criticised by The Foster Report

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The quality, innovation and productivity organisation, Amnis, has sounded a note of caution in the debate over the recently published Dr Foster Hospital Guide. It has also set out a process to help those organisations which have been criticised in the Guide to improve performance by developing their internal capabilities.

Amnis’ Mark Eaton commented: “Hospitals are complex organisations employing thousands of people and with budgets measuring in the hundreds of millions of pounds. Any one assessment is liable to be different from another and, in the busy world of the NHS, performance can vary from hour to hour – so it’s not surprising that different organisations report different results from different assessments.

“Unless the UK public are prepared to employ an army of assessors to work every day with each organisation overseeing what they do at every step, it’s unlikely that we’ll escape a world that needs at least some self-assessment and one in which there will continue to be discontinuities between different assessments,” he continued.

“I don’t believe that any hospital management team has deliberately tried to mislead their assessors. Of course, that doesn’t mean that they don’t try to portray their organisation in a good light.

“The problem is that you need to clarify self-assessment performance and get some quality assurance on its accuracy before you use it in PR.”

At the end of November, Dr Foster - an independent organisation founded on a belief in the need for greater transparency about variations in healthcare performance and dedicated to helping patients make informed decisions about their health - published its latest annual hospital directory which compares the performance of NHS trusts and evaluates the levels of NHS quality throughout the UK.

The Dr Foster Hospital Guide stated that 12 NHS hospital trusts in England are ‘significantly underperforming’, despite nine hospitals recently having been rated as good or excellent by regulators. The Guide’s findings are based on a range of indicators including death rates, infection rates and staffing levels.

However, the Care Quality Commission (CQC), which had recently given nine of those trusts 'good' or 'excellent' ratings for their overall performance, said it saw no need to intervene. In addition, at least three of Dr Foster’s 12 worst-performing trusts have elite 'foundation' status.

Amnis’ Eaton said: “Hospitals adapt to meet the needs of their local population and will change the amount of funding put into specific services based on the need of the population they serve. In other words, it’s difficult to create a ‘like for like’ measure that can be applied to all hospitals uniformly.

“I believe the problems of assessing such large and complex organisations should not be underestimated and so I don’t think the Dr Foster report has undermined the CQC - or vice versa.

“Importantly, I doubt that any assessment regime for the NHS could ever be perfect but, over the last few years, its assessment regime has developed improved accuracy, better ways of comparing performance across hospitals and an increasing understanding of the difficulties of comparing different populations being served by hospitals,” he remarked.

Davinder Virdi, director of strategy at Amnis, added: “Amnis can – and does - help organisations to align their service improvement programmes so that they deliver the strategic objectives for the organisation. For example, if the organisation identifies a high cost, then we can work with them – in a special process called ‘Transformation Mapping’ - to identify the specific actions that would help them reduce these costs and improve performance by developing their internal capabilities.”

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About Amnis Limited

Working with both public and private sector organisations, Amnis is a consultancy which specialises in innovation, transformation and organisational improvement, helping clients plan and deploy strategies for successful transformation. Its goal is to help clients not only deliver sustainable change but also to develop their capability to tackle their next challenges.

Providing both consultancy and training services, Amnis’ team includes specialists in Lean/Six Sigma, organisational development, strategic planning, change management and systems thinking.

Further information from:

Ruth Bodman, Amnis, 00 44 (0) 870 446 1002; ruthbodman@amnis.uk.com
Bob Little, Bob Little Press & PR, 00 44 (0)1727 860405; bob.little@boblittlepr.com