This article presents various estimates of change in productivity in public expenditure on health. One of these uses the output estimates included in the current National Accounts.
Recognising that these estimates make no allowance for quality change, a distinct drawback, the article then goes on to present additional sets of productivity estimates implied by newly proposed methodologies for taking account of quality change. These draw on work published by the Centre for Health Economics (University of York) and the National Institute for Economics and Social Research, and by the Department of Health in 2005.
It also presents an improvement to the wider set of evidence that helps build up an overall picture of Health Service performance. The intention is now to engage in a public consultation about the new methodologies proposed to help evaluate how health productivity should best be assessed. The article should be seen as a staging post in a continuing journey to improve measurement of public sector productivity.
This article is the third in an on-going series of Public Service Productivity articles following the first Health and Education articles published in October 2004 and October 2005, respectively.
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