Northerner
Admin (Retired)
- Relationship to Diabetes
- Type 1
Targets have become synonymous with the NHS. From hospital operations to cancer care and fighting superbugs, successive governments have used them to keep a grip on performance.
And now - just five months away from an election - all eyes are on how the health service performs against its most high-profile measures.
But is this obsession with targets healthy and do they even work in the first place? The answer is not a simple one. One of the easiest ways to understand targets and the effect they have is to think of the health service as a balloon: squeeze one part and it bulges out elsewhere.
Take hospital waiting times, perhaps the flagship target of the whole NHS. When the target was first brought in in 2000 the bar was set at an 18-month maximum wait. Then over the course of four years it was brought down to six months.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-30237151
And now - just five months away from an election - all eyes are on how the health service performs against its most high-profile measures.
But is this obsession with targets healthy and do they even work in the first place? The answer is not a simple one. One of the easiest ways to understand targets and the effect they have is to think of the health service as a balloon: squeeze one part and it bulges out elsewhere.
Take hospital waiting times, perhaps the flagship target of the whole NHS. When the target was first brought in in 2000 the bar was set at an 18-month maximum wait. Then over the course of four years it was brought down to six months.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-30237151