Stupid Targets

We had a meeting this morning regarding a government issued questionnaire given to patients having certain operations and their experience before and 6 months after.

This started last April and we were told "It won't have much work involved but ask the patients if they would fill the booklet in, consent and then they would be sent another follow up form in 6 months". Yeah right.

We find out that the Trust has a return rate of 19% for these forms which isn't great but I worked out our returns at about 64% so was reasonably pleased but I'm sure we could do better. We went to the meeting to find the return rate target is 100%.

We have to try and "convince" every patient to complete the booklet. It is not an essential piece of hospital paper, and trust me there are plenty of them, and we have had patients refuse to fill them in.

This means that the 100% target for a reasonable size hospital and the volume of flow through of patients means someone is going to say no. That means we instantly fail. Where is the motivation in that. We have also been told that if a hospital doesn't obtain 100% they are financial penalised. More paper chasing, pen pusher, target driven government failure instead of treating people and valuing their choices they are data to be collected.