Hospital trusts productivity in the English NHS: Uncovering possible drivers of productivity variations

In 2009, the NHS Chief Executive warned that there was a potential shortfall of £20 billion in funding for the NHS. To address that shortfall priority was given to increasing efficiency and preventing waste. Our study looks at how NHS Trusts perform in terms of how much they produce given the resources (doctors, nurses, medicines and premises) they use. We find that on these criteria – which economists call productivity measures – there is a lot of variation between trusts and that the best and worst performers stay the same over time. It is not possible to explain away the variation in terms of the kinds of patients that are treated. These results suggest that there may be scope for making substantial savings by ensuring that all Trusts perform as well as the best ones.

Full Report: CHE Research Paper 117 (PDF , 1,991kb)‌

Supplementary material: Total factor productivity (MS Excel , 50kb) Labour productivity (MS Excel , 47kb)‌

Other papers in the CHE Research paper series can be found at: In house publications