Involving stakeholders in university hospital performance reporting: The state of the art in Italy

Abstract

University hospitals (UHs) need to pay attention to diverse stakeholders' interests when reporting their performance information, to meet different knowledge expectations concerning the activities they have performed and the outcomes they have achieved. In the existing literature, the level of consideration of UH performance reports reserve for a broad variety of stakeholders interested in UH outcomes, each with different information needs, has not been analyzed. To contribute to fill this gap, this study offers an empirical examination of the Italian experience by investigating whether and to what extent all the thirty-two public university hospital authorities (UHAs) involve stakeholders in their annual performance reports (APRs). First, sixteen key stakeholder groups with an interest in the performance reporting of UHAs were mapped, and the related accountability relationships were described. Subsequently, the APRs for 2017 were examined by employing the content analysis method and common descriptive statistics. Findings reveal that only one UHA involved all sixteen stakeholder groups in its performance report; sixteen UHAs involved at least ten stakeholder groups; and the remainder showed a weak, scarce or even absent involvement for stakeholders. Moreover, it emerged that three stakeholder groups were singled out for greater attention in UHA performance reports (patients, managers and regional government) over others. Involving stakeholders in performance reports needs to be encouraged, as it is an essential prerequisite for developing suitable integrated performance reporting systems.

Gender Budgeting Implementation in Italian Regional Governments: Institutional Behavior for Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment

“…This is because the creation of value includes relevant social aspects, as well as economic, environmental and whole-system aspects of sustainability development and corporate social responsibility (Bebbington & Dillard, 2008;Henriques, 2013). This is emphasized by the growing literature on sustainability reporting and integrated reporting, which argues that performance reporting systems should include, with a more holistic and comprehensive view of performance, all dimensions of the organizational value creation and thus provide stakeholders with economic, social, environmental, and governance (financial and non-financial) information (Dumay et al, 2016;Adams, 2017;de Villiers & Maroun, 2017;Manes-Rossi et al, 2018;Del Gesso, 2019). Considering gender diversity matters therefore, has the ability to create an organization's value and consequently, organizational disclosures need to include gender impact information.…”

Performance reporting in the healthcare sector: evidence from Italian healthcare organisations

“…In the past decades, the New Public Management (NPM) philosophy has highlighted the importance of improving the efficiency and effectiveness of Public Sector Organisations (PSOs), leading researchers and practitioners to pay more attention to the role of performance measurement and reporting systems in guaranteeing PSOs' transparency and accountability (Guthrie and Martin-Sardesai, 2020;Grossi et al, 2020). Indeed, according to some scholars, performance reporting systems are amongst the most important accountability tools used by PSOs (Manes-Rossi et al, 2018a;Del Gesso, 2019). In the public sector, accountability is "a different, complex, chameleon-like and multifaced concept encompassing several dimensions" (Guthrie and Martin-Sardesai, 2020, p. 1).…”

“…In the public sector, accountability is "a different, complex, chameleon-like and multifaced concept encompassing several dimensions" (Guthrie and Martin-Sardesai, 2020, p. 1). Therefore, to assess this complexity, PSOs' performance reporting systems need to go beyond the traditional financial measurements and integrate non-financial information that can better represent the created value (Del Gesso, 2019;Garengo and Sardi, 2020;Guthrie and Martin-Sardesai,…”

“…2020; Markowicz and Rudawska, 2021). Reporting both financial and non-financial performance allows PSOs to provide stakeholders with more comprehensive information, thus leading to increased institutional and strategic legitimacy (Del Gesso, 2019).…”

“…In the public sector accounting debate, although research on the impact of HCOs' performance information PR is growing (Campanella et al, 2016;Bonollo and Zuccardi-Merli, 2016;Romanelli et al, 2019;Del Gesso., 2019), there is a lack of attention paid to the disclosure level and the type of the information provided in the performance reports.…”