Performance Measurement Systems and Strategic Management within UK Healthcare

April 2009 was an important period for all National Health Service (NHS) Community Health Services (CHS) organisations as they were formally separated from the commissioning service in the Primary Care Trust (PCT). This had many implications, including the need to establish individual board, develop independent strategy, and set-up autonomous governance. The host organisation was keen to investigate the effectiveness of the current strategy deployment process and subsequently identify areas for improvement. Our investigation looked into adapting strategy deployment systems such as the Closed-Loop Management Systems (Kaplan and Norton 2008) at NHS CHS organisations which can facilitate organisational needs in the area of strategy deployment. As human capital with the suitable skills is required for any successful implementation of a management system, the researchers expanded the scope by including an assessment of the organisation’s readiness for adapting formal strategy deployment systems in terms of management skills levels.