By Dr Shimaa Elkomy

Dr Shimaa Elkomy explores the impact of waiting policy targets on patient care and outcomes and finds that we may be missing the point. 

Why have your hospital waiting times shortened? 

In the private sector, quality of a product is reflected in the price. But what about the quality of a public sector? How can we assess the quality of a public service given it is distributed for free? Some governments opted to adopt performance indicators that aimed at specifying the pursued quality of the service. In the English health care sector, shorter waiting times are one of the key performance indicators of the quality of health care. 

The waiting time target was not just a output measure but a management performance tool used to address the chronic long waiting times of the English hospitals. The UK government created a system of strict penalties or rewards based on meeting shorter waiting time targets. Some call this system “targets and terror” as it subjected top leadership to possible public humiliation and reputational damage whilst granting highly scoring hospitals a greater autonomy and access to finance.

by Dr Shimaa Elkomy
as published in European Hospital

Since the 1980’s the private sector has increasingly provided public services based on the argument that this would increase efficiency through competition. Considerable literature finds greater cost efficiency under private provision of cleaning services in hospitals. 
 
Dr Shimaa Elkomy at the University of Surrey,  Research Fellow at the Department of Healthcare Management & Policy, Faculty of Business, Economics and Law, and her colleagues carried out a study to assess the effect of out-sourcing cleaning services in the UK’s healthcare sector. ‘Mainly, we were focusing on acute hospitals in 2011 and 2012 and the effects of out-sourcing cleaning services on microbiological and non-microbiological cleaning standards, as well as to examine whether the hospitals that are contracting out are cost-efficient and exhibit high-labour productivity compared to hospitals with in-house cleaning teams, Dr Elkomy points out.

This website provide a launch pad for the dissemination of research, comment and publications for the Delivering Better for Less: Improving Productivity in the Public Services research team.

This £1million Leverhulme funded project will look to interrogate four underlying assumptions of recent public service reforms.