§ Baroness Noakesasked Her Majesty's Government:
Whether they will publish the underlying data relating to changes in activity levels and health and community health services expenditure expressed in volume form which are shown in graphical form in Figure 7.7 of the Department of Health's Departmental Report (CM 5904) so that the efficiency increase of two per cent over the 10 years to 2000–01 referred to in paragraph 7.100 of the report can be analysed for each of those years. [HL4230]
§ Baroness AndrewsChanges in the way healthcare is delivered by the National Health Service now means that this measure of NHS efficiency is no longer reliable. For example, this efficiency measure fails to count an increasingly large amount of activity—such as procedures undertaken in primary care—or nurse-led outpatient admissions; records improvements that result in reducing the number of steps in a patient journey as a fall in efficiency; may perversely record real efficiency improvements as reductions in efficiency—for example when activity is shifted from inpatient to outpatient settings; and fails to pick up any improvements in quality.
The Department of Health is therefore developing a new efficiency measure that will take account of the quality, casemix and diverse way in which NHS outputs are delivered.