Targets and Public Services: a case of incorrect thinking Jake - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation
Targets and Public Services: a case of incorrect thinking Jake Chapman Demos Associate The case for targets Within the public sector targets have shifted attention from the inputs (budgets) to the outputs Targets have forced the
Within the public sector targets have shifted
Targets have forced the collection of
Targets provide clear guidance on priorities
Improved accountability for both Ministers
Very large numbers of targets
Professionals and front line staff complain
Not meeting a target regarded as failure
Significant number of negative unintended
Secondary schools are ranked according to
One immediate consequence of this was that
Very good and very weak students received
Doctor’s surgeries have been given a target
In our local rural surgery this has caused
because people try to organise their visits to
Hospitals in a locality used to share
One of the hospitals has a zero star rating
One of the other hospitals has a borderline 2
which has reduced the performance of A&E in
Police have targets to meet on solved crimes Wallet stolen between leaving taxi and being
Serious difficulty having anyone accept the
Conversely domestic rows are eagerly
as two ‘solved’ cases of assault
Target that all suspected cases are seen by a
Works well for women with standard
Caused loss of service for women with non-
these women have a greater need to see
Based upon scientific management which is explicitly based upon regarding
Language used exposes the way of thinking But large organisations are not machines and professional staff are not ‘cogs’ Where the theoretical assumptions do not
Adopting a more holistic or systemic view of
metaphor of a complex adaptive system Key difference is in degree of predictability
and in recognition of importance of different
Leads to prediction of many of the negative
A target will become the purpose of the
Targets cause managers to focus on
Data associated with the target will be
Significant sources of variation will be ignored Qualitative aspects of service ignored Generates high overhead of ‘failure demand’
Public services are fundamentally different
As recipients of public services we are consumers of the service citizens concerned with spending taxes interested in issues of equity and fairness as concerned about trust, being treated with
Public services cannot be ‘delivered’ because we are each directly involved in the
We are co-producers of the outcomes of
talking about health and education as if they
to the detriment of the whole enterprise
The use of targets emerges from a particular
a view that is demonstrably inadequate and leads to a large number of negative
There are more productive approaches based
adopting these requires a radical change in