National Mental Health Benchmarking Project
In 2006, the National Mental Health Benchmarking Project, a collaborative initiative between States, Territories and the Australian Government, established demonstration benchmarking forums within the four main program areas of public sector mental health services (adult, child and adolescent, older persons and forensic).
There were four core objectives in undertaking the national project:
- To promote the sharing of information between organisations to increase understanding and acceptance of benchmarking as a key process to improve service quality.
- To identify of the benefits, barriers and issues arising for organisations in the mental health field engaging in benchmarking activities.
- To understand what is required to promote such practices on a wider scale.
- To evaluate the suitability of the national mental health performance framework (domains, sub domains and key performance indicators) as a basis for benchmarking and identifying areas for future improvement of the framework and its implementation.
Each forum consisted of between four and eight mental health service organisations from across six jurisdictions. The forums were aligned with the main program streams within the mental health sector:
National Mental Health Benchmarking Project Resources
To facilitate the dissemination of information about the benchmarking project and to assist in the development of benchmarking activities in Australia's mental health services, services participating in the four Benchmarking Project streams agreed that the following information would be made available.
Project Manuals Part 1 - 3
"Project Manual Part 1: General information for participating organisations" aims to assist services participating in the forums by providing basic information about: the background to, and objectives of, the national benchmarking project; the current status of benchmarking in Australian mental health services; the expected benefits for participating organisations; how the forums will be coordinated; the plannned timetable of activities; how the forums will be run; what information will be benchmarked; and how the project will be evaluated.
"Project Manual Part 2: Basic concepts to guide indicator development and desirable attributes of performance measurement systems" provides useful background to key concepts in key performance indicators. The first section describes six key issues upon which a shared understanding is needed and which are central to the design of any performance measurement framework within the health care industry. The second section summarises the attributes of performance measurement systems described in the literature as important to success. They emphasise that an effective performance measurement approach does not come easily and requires careful planning.
"Project Manual Part 3: Technical specifications for the national KPIs" has been prepared to guide organisations on how to prepare the national key performance indicators (KPIs) from their locally available data. The focus is on the 13 national KPIs described in the document 'Key Performance Indicators for Australian Public Mental Health Services' as these are the main indicators used in the benchmarking forums.