How is the NHS performing? April 2011

Over the next few years the NHS faces two unprecedented challenges: coping with the tightest funding settlement for decades and implementing top-to-bottom reforms of the system.

The broad goal of both the productivity and reform challenges is to improve NHS performance and hence the quality of patient care. But both challenges have inherent uncertainties and given the pace at which changes in service delivery and performance are likely to occur, their impact on key indicators of NHS performance will need to be understood in evaluating progress.

This monitoring report is the first of a regular quarterly review, which will combine publicly available data on selected NHS performance measures with views from a panel of finance directors on the key issues their organisations are facing. It complements our monthly waiting times tracker and is a continuation of work that we have done historically to assess, analyse and report on the performance of the NHS.

We have chosen the indicators that we believe are important to the public and patients and that provide measures of the impact of tackling the productivity and reform challenges confronting the NHS. These include:

• key performance challenges
• workforce and redundancies
• waiting times.

See more of our work on this with our other quarterly monitoring reports