Adviser — Hospital Performance Improvement

Separate recoverable inefficiency from a resource deficit

The adviser will assess hospital performance and recommend improvements grounded in the actual operating constraints. The assignment requires a balanced view of utilisation, cost, service reliability and patient experience rather than a single drive to increase activity.

Diagnostic priorities

Review selected service lines, support functions and administrative processes. Identify avoidable cancellations, idle capacity, procurement delays and repeated operational failures. Test whether reported performance reflects data quality issues or genuine variation before recommending targets.

Improvement advice

Develop a prioritised plan with operational owners, resource requirements and realistic sequencing. Distinguish changes that can be made through management discipline from those requiring investment or specialist clinical redesign. Recommend short improvement trials where uncertainty is high, with measures of benefit and unintended consequences.

Performance recommendations should show the cause of the problem, the proposed change and the mechanism by which improvement is expected. If cancellations arise from equipment unavailability, a scheduling target alone will not solve them. The adviser should identify which measures reveal sustained improvement and which could be met through workarounds. Compare the cost of additional capacity with the opportunity to recover existing capacity, and make any quality or workload trade-offs explicit for the appropriate clinical and operational leaders to assess.

Acceptance and handover

Deliver a clear diagnosis, feasible interventions and a review process that management can sustain. Candidates should discuss a cost-saving proposal they rejected because it would have increased service failure or shifted cost elsewhere. The adviser does not take over clinical decisions or operational management unless separately appointed; recommendations should be specific enough for accountable leaders to act on and evaluate.