Measuring productivity: an approach to measuring quality weighted outputs in social care

This article describes an approach to measuring outputs of social care that is intended to reflect changes in quality and outcomes over time. The approach is applied using available data on services for older people, illustrating both the potential and some of the challenges of putting it into practice. The results reflect the impact of policy on the outputs of home care and care homes, allowing us to identify changes in the productivity of resources in caring for an ageing population, an issue of international concern.