Key Challenge 1
Improving Service Delivery

To improve the quality, efficiency and value for money of our existing services.


Key Outcome for Stakeholders
We are committed to setting exacting targets to demonstrate to stakeholders the effectiveness, quality and value of our core services.

Introduction
We set and monitor our performance against exacting targets across all our services. These targets cover the delivery, quality and cost of our services. We will develop measures to test stakeholder satisfaction with our services. Our performance against these indicators will be shared with stakeholders by publishing this information on our Web Site and elsewhere.


Service Targets
The outcomes that matter are those that are important to our stakeholder communities. Pharmacy contractors want payments that are accurate and timely and transparency of decisions. NHS stakeholders want comprehensive, timely and accurate trend and cost information covering prescribing and dispensing. Claimants under the NHS LIS want decisions that are correct and delivered quickly.

The DH wants these stakeholder requirements to be satisfied at the least cost to the taxpayer.

What is Measured?
We provide five core types of service:

• Payment - processing over two million prescription-items for payment every working day.
• Information - analysing each item to form the basis of our prescribing information services.
• Pharmaceutical - providing regulatory and administrative support to the DH to enable it to manage a range of pharmaceutical services.
• Benefits - administering exemption or assistance with health costs for those who need it.
• Managed Services - underpinning our own direct services and those of a range of other NHS organisations.

For each service, we will measure the effective delivery of the service; the quality of what we deliver; the efficiency with which we deliver it; and, over the period of this strategy, we will develop our understanding of the satisfaction of service users with what they receive. We will set realistic but stretching targets for effectiveness, efficiency and quality performance indicators for each of the years covered by this strategy.

Service Efficiency and Effectiveness
We will take forward a programme of continuous evolutionary change to improve the delivery, quality and cost-effectiveness of our services in the external market we serve, within the constraints of our funding.

We will continue to support a series of Service Improvement Programmes (SIPs) which involve creating multifunctional teams to deal with specific programmes of work improvement. We will maintain a review programme designed to support the PPA as a High Performance Organisation linked to the technological and workforce developments highlighted under Key Challenge 3.

We recognise that to effect radical improvements in quality, efficiency and cost-effectiveness a new business process paradigm is required, hence our commitment to the transfer of prescriptions electronically allied to reengineering our business processes.

Improving Delivery
We will publish target dates for the availability of our most significant services and programmes. We will monitor our performance in delivering effective and efficient services to our stakeholders by these dates. We will publish information on the timely delivery of our key services through our Web Site. Where it is achievable, we will work to increase the timeliness of our service delivery over the next five years.

Improving Quality
We will ensure that our services are fit for purpose. We will work to maintain existing certified quality standards and improve them where it is cost effective to do so. We will develop measures to test stakeholders' satisfaction with our services. We will share information about our performance against these measures.

Improving Cost Efficiency
We will reduce the unit costs of our services while maintaining current or improved levels of quality. When we can improve the design and delivery of our services, we will do so by containing their global costs, to improve their overall value for money to the NHS and to secure savings, which we can use to invest in the future of our services.

Improving Stakeholder Satisfaction
We are committed to meeting stakeholder needs and to delivering
services to their satisfaction which are fit for purpose and acting when our services have not lived up to expectations. We will work with our stakeholders, to examine their satisfaction with our current services, to involve them in dialogue about the future, and to assist us to put appropriate measures of performance together in this area.

Click here for objectives linked to this key challenge.

Click here to go back to the Contents.