In an article in June’s Health & Care Management it is reported that the Scottish Parliament’s Health Committee, despairing of the slow uptake of telehealth, is recommending that targets are set for NHS organisations. While there is a very good chance that readers of Telecare Aware will applaud the desire to improve uptake, perhaps targets will be counterproductive and increase clinician resistance? As we know, doctors are even more inventive than the rest of us in finding ways to sabotage any initiative they take a dislike to. Are targets the best way forward? It would be interesting to hear readers’ views. Cross Country. [If you get stuck trying to find your way to page 14 where the article starts, try looking just below your browser’s toolbar.]
1 thought on “Scotland to get telehealth targets?”
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Scottish telecare targets
When carefully designed and implemented, there’s nothing wrong with targets.
The problems come when too many contradictory targets pull against each other or, as we all know, bad target design with no awareness of the system-wide implications leads to gaming. In Scotland the 4 hour emergency care target was actually pretty good in helping to concentrate the mind and stimulating innovation to improve unscheduled care processes within hospitals. The problem was that it was unable to effect change on the out of hospital processes.
It will be interesting to see what telecare targets are adopted – there’s plenty of scope of massive confusion and gaming if it’s just crude numbers (e.g. installations or households).