Home » Research Projects » An Exploratory Study of Parliamentarians and their Use of Healthcare Performance Metrics: The Scottish Parliament Health and Community Care Committee
'Politics by Numbers'
How parliamentarians use healthcare performance metrics
Sets of numbers purporting to represent the performance of public services are much prevalent in current politics. With incumbent governments eager to trumpet the success of their initiatives when metrics show performance improvements and opposition parties equally quick to jump on every missed target as a chance to attack the government, benchmarks, league tables and performance targets have become a staple of media discussions. But how often are public service performance metrics used for more than just propaganda and political point-scoring? How many performance metrics are produced for their own sake and then never used by anyone other than auditors and accountants? How far do politicians use metrics constructively, to monitor current services and inform parliamentary debate on how to make good decisions about provision of future services and safeguarding the public? Gordon Marnoch is looking at the surprisingly little explored question of how elected politicians use public service performance metrics, taking the case of the Scottish Parliament and healthcare performance metrics.
What the research means for policymakers and the wider community
This will be one of the first studies to show when, why and how politicians use performance metrics. What is discovered about such behaviours’ in the Scottish Parliament may be applicable to other legislatures in different countries too.
- He will find out whether politicians from different parties use healthcare metrics more, less or differently.
- He will identify the most frequently used sets of performance metrics and the context in which parliamentarians refer to them in committee business.
- Organisations and public bodies responsible for generating health care metrics will be able to draw on the analysis to see whether the data they are collecting is being used or is in need of refinement, and the findings of the project will be communicated through seminars with key stakeholder groups (e.g. the Committee and officers of the Scottish Parliament, audit agencies, NHS managers and the General Medical Council.)
Research methods
- The study will begin with a desk-based content analysis of Scottish Parliament Health and Community Care Committee documents including minutes, meeting papers, and reports kept between 1999-2007.
- Interviews will then be carried out with past and present committee members, clerks, and ministers probing the role of healthcare metrics in policy scrutiny and the consequences for health and social services locally and nationally.
Research details
The project, ‘An Exploratory Study of Parliamentarians and their Use of Healthcare Performance Metrics: The Scottish Parliament Health and Community Care Committee’, runs from 1 February 2008 until October 2008.