By Lucy Phillips
25 October 2010
Better managed hospitals have lower mortality rates and cost less to run, according to a report published today.
Researchers at the London School of Economics’ Centre for Economic Performance and consultancy McKinsey & Company assessed the management practices of almost 1,200 hospitals in seven countries: the UK, US, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Sweden.
In the UK, a small improvement in management practices equated to a 6% fall in the rate of deaths from heart attacks. Better management was also associated with better financial performance and greater productivity.
The report, Management in health care: why good practice really matters, identified a series of factors that had a significant impact on management practices and outcomes. There was a greater variation in management practices within countries than between them.
Overall, hospitals that faced greater competition, had more than 100 employees and were privately owned achieved higher scores across all countries.
Hospitals with clinically qualified managers also achieved better management scores. The UK was found to have the lowest proportion of managers with a clinical degree among the countries surveyed.
Professor John Van Reenen, director of the CEP at LSE, said: ‘An overriding message is that management quality varies greatly within countries, even within a publicly dominated health care sector like the NHS. Many of the same factors that matter in other sectors – such as competition and skills – also matter for health care.
‘For the UK, having more clinically trained managers should be a priority.’
