January 2012 - Sandwell & West Birmingham Hospitals

SWBTB (1/12) 283 (a)
The NHS Leadership Qualities Framework (LQF)
6.0 Information Management
6.1 High quality information is vital for the Trust to be successful. Managers and leaders at
all levels in the Trust need accurate, timely, appropriate information upon which to make
clinical and business decisions.
6.2 Work is underway to address general issues with informatics. However, for the Trust to
progress further with SLM, financial information needs to meet the needs of the directorate
and divisional management teams. The Trust has acquired a service line reporting system,
Ardentia, but this will not take the Trust to a position of understanding patient level costing
without changes to the resources committed to delivery of a PLICs system. In addition,
support services divisions (Imaging & Pathology) need to be in a position where cross
changing can take place which would reinforce the responsibility and accountability of how
user directorates append their funds and budgets are set using service lines.
6.3 A process of iterative dialogue with the directorates will inform the development of
accurate financial statements and information displayed using the portfolio of tools
proposed by Monitor based on high quality information. The tools present a different
perspective of financial performance. However, understanding a new presentation of
financial information will call for management teams to be educated about how to
understand and interpret the outputs.
6.4 The SLM Steering Group will continue to review issues relating to service line reporting
and PLICs, particularly the suitability of the current software solution.
5