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Unit 13: Performance Measurement in Services

Implementing performance measurement also provides an opportunity to assess more Notes
pragmatic accountability issues, such as evaluating and defining roles and responsibilities,
and levels and lines of authority. Assigning this day-to-day accountability helps reduce
the “It wasn’t my job” or “It wasn’t up to me” responses to issues, problems, and crises.
The nice thing about this more pragmatic accountability is that day-to-day roles and
responsibilities and lines of authority are the key ingredients in successfully contributing
to meeting the large, big-picture goals for which you are also, in part, accountable.

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Caution It is best to assign accountability from the perspective of achieving quality
improvement, not to mete out punishment. Reprimands, jobs lost, and slashed funding
are not particularly helpful outcomes of the accountability assigned in performance
measurement.

5. Improving Work Quality: Implementing performance measurement gives you an
opportunity to assess the quality or effectiveness of your work right now. You can’t
measure progress if you haven’t got a baseline.
Once you’ve completed that scary task, developing a performance measurement process
offers you two more opportunities

The opportunity to identify those areas where you want to improve and have ready
access to the tools you need to make it happen.

The opportunity to track changes (ideally, improvements) in quality and effectiveness
in these areas over time.
So performance measurement gives you an opportunity to assess, right now, the quality
and effectiveness of your work, as well as an opportunity to develop ways to improve on
both. Reaching out to peers and trolling the literature to learn about “best practices” – or
“good examples” – in public health, including some of the most effective intervention
strategies, will help in this regard.

Did u know? Many measures that track health outcomes (such as infant mortality rates) or
social functioning (such as child abuse) are affected by so many factors that change in
outcomes cannot be attributed to specific program effectiveness alone. Attribution of
responsibility for outcomes becomes even more difficult when the services in question
are supported by multiple funding sources or multiple providers
6. Tracking Progress: This is one of the things that performance measurement is all about!
Tracking your progress over time through performance measurement gives you an
opportunity to assess and improve on practices, processes, activities, and systems. Tracking
performance measures allows you to observe whether changes in things like management
practices or data retrieval techniques are working. Bottom line: performance measurement
allows you to track your progress toward achieving your objectives and meeting your
goals. Conducting performance measurement also gives you good information to help
identify problem areas that need attention. Although it cannot tell you why these areas
aren’t working as effectively as you might like, performance measurement gives you
information on where the problems might be, a critical first step.
Tracking performance measures also helps reveal where you’re having success. You might
want to examine these areas, too, to find out the “why”: Why is this activity working so
well? Could an approach in use here serve as a model for others?

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