Essence of Care benchmarking: putting it into practice

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to introduce Essence of Care, a benchmarking tool for health care practitioners and an integral part of the UK National Health Service (NHS) Clinical Governance agenda. It focuses on how one NHS Community Health Trust has attempted to introduce organisation‐wide benchmarking by using a workshop programme to raise awareness and act as a catalyst to initiate implementation. An evaluation of progress made six months after the workshops were delivered is described.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper outlines the case study approach taken and describes the qualitative methods used in the small scale evaluation, namely interviews and focus groups with the decision makers and implementers of Essence of Care across the case study site.

Findings

The evaluation highlights that whilst raising awareness is relatively straightforward, putting Essence of Care into practice is more difficult to achieve, especially when happening at a time of significant organisational change. The discussion considers the need for a receptive context for change when implementing benchmarking for service improvement and reviews whether Essence of Care benchmarking could be a practical framework for developing an improvement culture within an organisation.

Originality/value

The empirical findings from this research will contribute to the knowledge and understanding of using benchmarking for service improvement within the NHS.

Citation

Matykiewicz, L. and Ashton, D. (2005), "Essence of Care benchmarking: putting it into practice", Benchmarking: An International Journal, Vol. 12 No. 5, pp. 467-481. https://doi.org/10.1108/14635770510619384