Balancing the balanced scorecard for a New Zealand mental health service

Abstract

Given the high prevalence of mental disorders, there is a need to evaluate mental health services to ensure they are efficient, effective, responsive and accessible. One method that is being used is the "balanced scorecard" which uses performance indicators in four quadrants to assess various dimensions of service provision. This case study describes the steps taken by a New Zealand mental health service to improve service management through greater use of key performance indicators in relation to preset targets using this approach.

Performance Management in Australia's Public Mental Health Service: A State Based Perspective

“…Internal users and staff/managers should be assisted by expert external facilitators and consultants to develop a consolidated set of KPIs that could be used for both compliance reporting and performance improvement. A New Zealand study (Coop 2006:179) clearly identified the need to involve staff in the development of outcome indicators in the same way that they should be involved in any change management process. Coop also identified a number of factors to be incorporated in any system in order to improve the usefulness of such measures.…”

Adapting the Balanced Scorecard for Mental Health and Addictions: An Inpatient Example

“…Baker and Pink (1995) proposed a strategy for adapting the BSC to healthcare organizations (also see Pink et al 2001;Zelman et al 2003), and many examples of its use have been reported (Wolfersteig and Dunham 1998;Griffith et al 2002;ten Asbroek et al 2004;Auger and Roy 2004;Yang and Tung 2006;Inamdar et al 2002). However, mental health and addictions have lagged behind other health sectors in adopting the BSC, as evidenced by few published case examples (Coop 2006;Santiago 1999;Schmidt et al 2006). …”

“…Toolkits and frameworks such as the MHSIP provide a common language and are generally accepted within the mental health community, whereas the BSC, because of its business management origins, is relatively foreign and thus risks poor credibility with mental healthcare providers (Coop 2006). However, because of its growing application to healthcare monitoring, especially in Ontario, adoption of the BSC provided an opportunity for mental health and addictions to share a common language with other healthcare measurement strategies.…”

“…This decision was supported by senior hospital administrators on the advisory panel, who felt that a provincial-level report card would be a useful complement to individual hospital monitoring efforts. The decision to apply the strategic plan of a larger system to smaller operational units differs from the approach taken in the United Kingdom (Schmidt et al 2006) and New Zealand (Coop 2006), where the scorecard was driven by the system' s own strategy rather than that of a larger entity in which the system was embedded. A strength of our approach is that it creates a multi-level framework that allows the common goals of units (e.g., hospitals) and their larger environment to be considered in tandem with those goals that are unit-specific (Lin et al 2002).…”

Evidence-Based Study on Performance Evaluation of Social Education Institutions with Balanced Scorecard

“…They focused mostly on presentation of processing, experience sharing, or simulating constitution of performance evaluation indicators. For example, the study of Chen et al (2006) on relation between key elements to measure Chinese and Japanese hospital performance; the study of Coop (2006) on Balanced Scorecard application in the mental health service for a New Zealand; the study of Kocakulah and Austill (2007) applied BSC in the health care industry; the study of Parkinson et al (2007) indicated a critical review of financial measures as reported in the hospital BSC; the study of Patel et al (2008) proposed balancing the NHS BSC; the research of Norreklit (2000) on exploration the balance on the balanced scorecard a critical analysis of some of its assumptions; the study of Cleverley and Cleverley (2005) on the discussion of using financial metrics to improve performance in Scorecards and dashboard; the study of Beard (2009) on the research and successful application of the Balanced Scorecard in Higher Education; the study of Kettunen (2004) on the evaluation of regional development in higher education based on the concept of Balanced Scorecard; the research of Andon et al (2008) on the discussion of using the balanced scorecard in slogans, seduction and State of Play.…”