Best practice organisational effectiveness in NHS Trusts. Allington NHS Trust case study

Measuring organisational effectiveness in a health care delivery context is a challenging task. Although there are numerous performance assessment models, audit tools and managerial diagnostic tools, they all tend to fall short in their attempts to closely scrutinize how health care organisations deploy their capabilities to deliver optimum quality in service provision and what performance levels they achieve as a result of their approach. The project reported here attempted to address the aforementioned issues. It set out to examine health care providers from an integrated perspective and to assess the key drivers of effective organisational performance using an adapted model based on the 7s' principles. The research project culminated into a major report highlighting best practices found to be inherent in 18 well performing health care providers. This paper reflects the experience of one of a series of Trusts whose approach to organisational effectiveness was closely examined.