Data and targets – the light brush stroke of getting things done

 

I just read an article about how rape prosecutions were in decline. So, the article went on to explain, there was a (long overdue) government review and fundamentally the outcome was that some targets were set for more prosecutions. No more funding, no more preventative or proactive measures put in place such as education, training or raising awareness, no more resourcing within the police to support rape victims. At best, this will bring the lack of rape prosecutions into focus for a while.

It reminded me of a time when Accident and Emergency Departments were given the target of seeing anyone who walked in their door within the first ten minutes. I heard anecdotally that this resulted in someone being given the job of holding a clipboard and ‘booking in’ new arrivals within said ten minutes and then the patient had to wait the same amount as time as before. Totally ineffective, and what’s more, the ‘clipboard person’ was actually a resource removed from elsewhere. With no further funding to meet the target, of course the target was unrealistic.

 This has been the way things have been dealt with increasingly in the last couple of decades and in the main, we have gone along with it and have not questioned it. This approach has become normal: an ‘issue’ of underperformance exists, so a target is set. Data has to be collected to check on that target and staff who are already stretched (thus the issue), now also have to collect data and fill in reports which removes them further from the frontline where the issue was in the first place.

Long gone is funding for preventative measures or in many cases, acute situations. Targets and data collection has replaced resourcing things properly. I will accept that there is a possibility that this approach works for a while as it drags resources from other areas to focus on the issue, but without further funding in an already overstretched system, adding data collection just gives less time for frontline work. And – as I have seen first-hand in education, people make data up. And they get away with it because there’s not enough person-hours to check the data that’s been inputted – certainly not with real scrutiny anyway. No this approach just asks people to work more and most of us intuit that it’s ultimately quite ineffective.