So, my HFMA workshop presentation came and went. How was it for me? Well, I thought it went on too long. I stuffed too much material in and didn’t give the audience enough time for questions. How was it for you?

My official feedback was unexpectedly good, but recognised there was definitely room for improvement. Overall that’s most fair me thinks. Except, on reflection – here I go again – I’m not sure exactly where the improvement is required? I wonder if my own reflections mirrored those of the audience? The feedback wasn’t at that level of detail, but then unless delegates had been asked to give a detailed view of my performance – and of course that might have completely switched them off from providing the feedback in the first place – how do I know exactly what they liked and what they didn’t?

Feedback is vitally important isn’t it? I start thinking about how will we know that the redesigned stroke pathway we implement is better than the existing one and as good as we had planned? Not only that but is it as good as planned, great or just okay? We are clearly going to need some absolutely defined and robust performance indicators to measure this pathway.

Measures that skim the surface, that are generically applied to all contracts and keep telling us at a superficial level that we are doing okay won’t be enough. The indicators need to be locally defined to meet our city’s health and social needs. We should be getting them to confirm that, not only are clinical and safety standards being surpassed, but also, that the quality of the service is second to none. How do you do that, when ‘how’ something feels is such a personal thing?

I’m going to ask the people who experience our services.  The next big event is coming up and maybe we can spend some time working on how we will know we have achieved what we planned to. We need to determine not only that we have passed the test, but actual performance is better than expected and we can see how we might move on and really stretch our providers to do much more in the future. That must be something we accountants, no I mean ‘seen the light’ service improving accountants, will want clarity on?