CONTROVERSY

Bench marking

Bench marking and performance management in neonatal care: easier said than done!

D Field¹, B Manktelow², E S Draper²

¹ Department of Child Health, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK
² Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, University of Leicester Medical School, 22–28 Princess Road West, Leicester LE1 6TP, UK

Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Professor Field, Department of Child Health, Robert Kilpatrick Clinical Sciences Building, University of Leicester, Leicester LE2 7LX, UK;
davidfield@uhl-tr.nhs.uk

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Methods of monitoring perinatal services are reviewed

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Keywords: bench marking; performance assessment; quality control

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

It seems now to be a "given" that all medical practitioners should be able to demonstrate the quality of what they do (performance management). Similarly there is an expectation among the public that the medical services available to them should be able to produce evidence of the fact that they are as good as those elsewhere (bench marking).^1,2 Neonatal care as a specialty has had a long tradition of trying to "monitor performance" both through the use of routine statistics (such as population based neonatal and perinatal death rates) and with more detailed data from ad hoc local and regional surveys.³ Despite this experience, satisfactory national data to underpin performance management and bench marking remain some way off. Providing data that can be appropriately understood and interpreted by the lay public remains a particular challenge. The lack of progress is the result of a number of factors and . . . [Full text of this article]

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