Ten questions to ask if you are scrutinising the effectiveness of your local hospital
This guide is one of a series designed to help health Overview and Scrutiny Committees (OSCs) carry out their scrutiny work around various health, healthcare and social care topics.
This guide is one of a series designed to help health Overview and Scrutiny Committees (OSCs) carry out their scrutiny work around various health, healthcare and social care topics.
Through its Health Scrutiny Support Programme, the Centre for Public Scrutiny is aware that many OSCs wish to establish to their own satisfaction, on behalf of local residents, that their local hospital is performing as effectively as possible. However, it is not by any means easy to navigate the enormous amount of information that is potentially available to OSCs or to know how to through a scrutiny review, to the myriad inspections, and monitoring systems of NHS performance that already exist.
This guide is intended to help members of OSCs ask the kind of questions that will help them bring a new perspective to the issues. In this guide, we have deliberately avoided discussing the current round of proposed reconfigurations of NHS services in England.
After the implementation of current proposals, local authority OSCs will continue to have a long-term interest in Health Overview and Scrutiny Committees and this document is based on that assumption. However, OSCs may also find it helpful to refer to our companion guide, 10 Questions to ask if you're scrutinising NHS reconfigurations.