Assessment of the ‘overall performance’ in respect of public services

‘Overall performance’ refers to a comprehensive coverage of the major issues that are generally regarded as important in assessing a public service. They could be broken down into three categories:

1. Financial indicators (assessing efficiency).
2. Non-financial quantitative indicators (assessing effectiveness).
3. Qualitative indicators that are difficult to quantify (assessing effectiveness).


1. Financial
 Cost per unit of activity/unit cost measurement e.g. per hospital bed per annum, annual cost per pupil, per arrest, per each call to attend a fire.
 A comparison between actual and budgeted or standard cost (variance analysis) – flexible budget approach may be adopted to relate costs to activity levels.
 Benchmarking costs against other regions and/or ‘best practice’.
 An indicator that measures cost recovery against service delivered – e.g. fees received from dental patients who are required to contribute towards the cost of a service – may be set at a ratio to total costs incurred.
 The ratio of one cost component to the total cost of the service e.g. staff costs as a percentage of the total costs. This could be supplemented by benchmarking ratios.


2. Non-financial (quantitative)
 Units of activity delivered within a period e.g. operations undertaken, number of children attending school, criminals arrested, fires attended.
 Flexibility and speed of response e.g. time taken for ambulances to arrive, hospital waiting lists and time elapsed between diagnosis and treatment.
 Quality of Service/output measures – pupils’ test marks, crime rates, life expectancy, the number of hospital deaths arising from infections, numbers of people rescued from fires.
 Utilisation of resources e.g. – bed occupancy ratios, average class size, ratio of police vehicles currently operational.
 Number of complaints received.
 Accessibility – e.g. distance to nearest hospital or school.


3. Qualitative
 Public confidence in the service – the strength of the expectation that –
 a criminal will be arrested.
 a pupil will receive a ‘good’ education.
 a patient will be ‘well looked after’ in hospital.
 the fire service will respond rapidly when required.
 The morale of the workforce.
 The ‘attitude’ of the staff – do they appear concerned, helpful and confident when dealing with the public?
 How effective are they at meeting the information needs of their 'customers’?
 Cleanliness, comfort, security – do people feel ‘comfortable’ within the premise owned by the public service (school and hospital)? It is part of ‘quality’, but it is difficult to quantify.




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