Battle lines are being drawn up as we head towards the election and interestingly there is a new point of contention for the major parties. Targets. In relation to the NHS, indeed any Government department, they have become short hand for "too many middle managers", "waste" or "red tape".
In a recent BBC article http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8538601.stm Professor David Kerr, a political adviser suggests that patient choice has been affected by a "blizzard of targets" and that the NHS has been left "bogged down by process driven targets". A cursory glance might leave many thinking that targets are a fairly bad idea. Valuable resources otherwise engaged in the business of saving lives are redirected to meaningless management of numbers. Even Radio 4 presenters are starting to suggest that a core component of "efficiency" would be to "drop all those targets".
I can't think of any human organisational endeavour where we assume that planning outcomes and taking a reading to measure progress against plan would be considered inefficient. Should we have built Terminal 5 without monitoring current and forecasting future passenger throughput? Fly to New York without (albeit automatically) monitoring the land speed, altitude and current position? Start at either end of the Channel Tunnel without monitoring when (or if) it will meet in the middle? I appreciate that the nature of the news can mean that complex subjects are overly simplified and that politicians need to work with sound bites but to suggest that targets are inherently a bad thing would be to mislead in the extreme. Let's find some other shorthand for overly bureaucratic departments, saying that it is 'all those targets' doesn't cut it. Measuring the wrong things or measuring the right things inefficiently is wasteful but measuring nothing means that a business (or a department) is guessing it's way to the next crisis.
