Development of occupational health performance indicators

Report: 13
Date: 21 June 2001
By: Clerk

Summary

The Human Resources Committee currently receives information on the number of cases and disposals of occupational health cases. An MPA officer has visited the Occupational Health Directorate and examined management information produced by the Directorate to suggest performance indicators that could be developed for monitoring the occupational health function. These are described in the paper along with other recommendations for performance monitoring in this area.

A. Recommendations

1. The Human Resources Committee receives a twice-yearly in-depth report on sickness including a breakdown of short-term and long-term sickness and the impact of occupational health on long-term sickness levels.
2. Members consider the indicators at paragraph 10 and paragraph 11 and their usefulness in monitoring the performance of Occupational Health.
3. The Human Resources Committee receives a twice-yearly report on the OH function, including information on indicators identified by members as useful for performance monitoring.
4. Members consider whether targets should be set for any of the indicators, particularly time-scale indicators.

B. Supporting information

Current Information provided to Human Resources Committee

1. The current information provided to the HR Committee regarding Occupational Health (OH) on a monthly basis is as follows:

• Number of new occupational health referrals per month
• Number of on-going health cases per month
• Cases concluded in the month as a percentage of on-going cases
• Number of new staff on recuperative duties
• Number of on-going staff on recuperative duties
• Number of referrals to Welfare Service

2. Of the information shown above only the third item relates to a measurement of performance. The other items show the workload of the occupational health unit. The chair of the HR committee felt that this was an area where performance monitoring could be improved, particularly in relation to timescales for dealing with cases. To this end, the MPA Senior Analyst visited the Occupational Health Directorate at the MPS.

The Occupational Health Directorate

3. The visit to the OH Directorate highlighted two main issues. Firstly that the work of the OH Directorate is extremely wide ranging and secondly that the impact of the work of the Directorate is difficult to measure as it is affected by inputs from boroughs and support units and by individual circumstances, discussed below in the development of performance indicators.

4. The range of functions carried out by the OH Directorate includes:

• Fitness testing for applicants
• Medical services
• Counselling
• Lifestyle testing for existing employees
• Physiotherapy and rehabilitation
• Health and safety

An organisational chart for the OH Directorate see Appendix 1.

Management information produced by the OH Directorate

5. The OH Directorate has developed a management information package, collecting information since July 2000. However, OH has not got an integrated IT system hence the information is generally collected by means of local computer systems and collated centrally. Currently health and safety data is not included due to lack of an IT system but this is being developed. Health and safety will be subject of a separate report to the Human Resources Committee in November.

6. The Directorate collects a large amount of data regarding the workload for most of the functions described above and local managers use this data actively as a management tool. Most of the information collected, however, relates to numbers of cases rather than performance indicators. Some of the information can be put into context of performance information, as described below. The collation of management information takes the OH Directorate time and effort hence it is recommended that any indicators developed for Human Resources Committee use existing information sources.

Development of OH Performance Indicators for Human Resources Committee

7. The outcome of the OH function is to impact upon sickness and retention levels of staff. However, these outcomes are difficult to determine as the inputs and outputs of the work of the function are affected by many other factors. Firstly, the input into OH is affected by managers across the MPS referring staff at the appropriate time. If staff that require attention are not referred quickly, there could be an increase in problems and time that will be required to deal with the staff. Secondly, sickness and retention levels will be affected by many other organisational and individual factors outside the control of the OH function.

8. It is recommended that the HR Committee continues to monitor sickness and retention levels and considers the impact that OH has on these measures. In particular, OH will impact on long-term sickness rather than short-term sickness. It may hence be useful for sickness data provided to the Human Resources Committee to show the long-term/short-term breakdown. The review of performance information to committees identified that the Human Resources Committee should receive twice-yearly in-depth reports on sickness. These reports should include an analysis of long-term sickness and the link with OH indicators where appropriate.

9. From the management information produced by the OH Directorate there is some scope for developing further performance indicators. These will fall into two main types – results and timescales. The HR committee should consider the indicators shown below and decide which would be of use for performance monitoring of the OH function.

10. On the results side the following indicators may be of use to the Human Resources Committee for monitoring purposes:

11. Timescale indicators readily available that may be of use to the Human Resources Committee are:

12. Most of the above indicators will not change dramatically from month to month; hence a periodic review of the information is recommended rather than inclusion into monthly summaries. It is recommended that the OH Directorate provide the Human Resources Committee with a twice-yearly report that includes information on the indicators felt to be of use by the Human Resources Committee.

13. From the OH management information report there does not appear to be targets set in any of the above areas, eg: to reduce waiting times to a target level. The Human Resources Committee may wish to discuss whether target setting would be appropriate in some of the indicators shown above.

C. Financial implications

None.

D. Background papers

None.

E. Contact details

The author of this report is Johanna Gillians, MPA.

For information contact:

MPA general: 020 7202 0202
Media enquiries: 020 7202 0217/18

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