Health and social care - strategic plans: statutory guidance

5. Monitoring performance

Section 42 of the 2014 Act outlines that integration authorities must produce an annual performance report that sets out an assessment of performance in planning and carrying out integration functions for the reporting year.

While there is a great degree of flexibility in how integration authorities may present their annual performance report, a number of key aspects must be covered. Performance must be assessed in the context of the arrangement set out in the integration authority’s strategic plan and financial statement. The annual performance report must relate to the national health and wellbeing outcomes. Performance should be monitored against the core suite of integration indicators. Integration authorities may wish to take these requirements into account when compiling their strategic plan to ensure the two documents are clearly and effectively aligned.

Further detail on annual reporting requirements is set out in the statutory guidance on performance reporting.

Reflecting on performance

To ensure appropriate performance monitoring against strategic plans, integration authorities should take into account the performance reporting requirements and statutory guidance early in the formation of their strategic plan’s vision and priorities.

A key aim of performance reporting is for integration authorities to reflect and use findings in a proactive way.

A number of tools to support performance monitoring have been developed at a national level including the Health and Social Care Whole System Dashboard, the Social Care Response and Delayed Discharge Dashboard and the TURAS Care Management tool. Consideration should be given as to how to make best use of these products as part of the performance monitoring approach.

Integration authorities should consider their performance against the ambitions communicated in their strategic plans and use insight and learning to inform future strategic direction, service design, and delivery in a meaningful way.

As planning requirements have now been in place for some time, integration authorities should seek to routinely review the effectiveness of their established arrangements, in a collaborative manner with wider partners, and seek to make appropriate adjustments to support improvement. This should include engagement with other local strategic partnership governance and decision-making forums to identify opportunities for alignment and integration of activity across planning cycles.

What good looks like

Good strategic planning ensures that decisions are informed by data from the statutory, third and independent sectors as well as from community, staff and user engagement.

To do this, the HIS Good Practice Framework for Strategic Planning advocates for:

• measuring what matters, not just what is available
• focusing on defined populations and their needs and not on conditions, services or pathways
• clearly identifying and including data on felt, comparative, normative and expressed need
• including data on what the system feels like to the people who use it
• seeking to understand what is driving population behaviour
• identifying the service level and performance of all current services providers from all sectors