ABSTRACT
There is little point in doing sophisticated analysis to produce validated measures of quality of care on expensively collected, reliable data if none of it sees the light of day – or if it’s presented in a format that its intended users can’t understand or act on. There are many possible ways of presenting data and a variety of potential audiences, though the latter can essentially be divided into two: staff and patients. Before providing examples of how performance data are shared with the public in different countries, it’s important to consider whether feeding back such information to healthcare staff affects their behaviour and changes practices and outcomes. First, though, we’ll briefly review the main ways of presenting performance data.
