Key messages
- The Partnering for performance guide assists health services and doctors to integrate performance development across their clinical work.
- The guide helps doctors to regularly appraise their clinical practice and undertake clinical audits and peer reviews.
- It also provides tools to help medical leads (medical directors or unit heads) establish accessible channels for feedback from doctors.
The Partnering for performance guide provides simple but effective tools to assist doctors and health services monitor their performance, promote regular performance discussions, and establish meaningful goals and targets for improving service delivery.
Through a series of practical tips, checklists, timelines and pro forma documents, the guide provides health services and senior clinicians with information to integrate performance monitoring and development into all aspects of their clinical care.
The guide also presents examples of competencies for senior doctors, clinical managers and organisations, which can be used for goal setting in the performance development domains of work achievement, professional behaviours, career progression, and learning and development.
Information to support doctors
Information in the guide is designed to help senior doctors to optimise the delivery of clinical care in their organisation by:
- engaging in ongoing dialogue with management about their clinical practice, with regular opportunities to provide and receive feedback
- undertaking a formal performance development and support meeting with their medical lead (medical director or unit head) on at least an annual basis
- establishing and being supported to achieve goals in the four performance development domains
- undertaking ongoing clinical audits and peer reviews throughout the credentialling cycle.
Information to support health services
The Partnering for performance guide provides tools to help health service organisations support the engagement of their senior doctors by:
- providing accessible channels for doctors to feed back information about the organisation’s strategy and processes
- providing appropriate resources to assist doctors with clinical audits and reviews
- promoting active participation by doctors in clinical improvement initiatives
- managing patient feedback and complaints appropriately and sensitively.
Information to support performance development meetings
Performance development meetings should consider a doctor’s participation in toolkit activities such as peer review and clinical audits, rather than analyses of organisational performance indicators.
The data used to inform performance development processes should always be agreed on in advance, and there should be no ‘surprises’ stemming from the unplanned production of data at a performance development meeting.
It is also important to ensure that the data used can be linked with a doctor’s continuing professional development (CPD) and medical registration requirements, as well as the organisation’s clinical governance processes.
Frequently asked questions
Partnering for Performance guide also includes a comprehensive list of frequently asked questions (FAQs), which provide senior medical staff with guidance on its requirements, processes, and the broader policy environment.
The FAQs cover a wide range of questions that are commonly posed by doctors and their medical leads in meeting the requirements of the partnering policy, including:
- who needs to participate
- how performance is assessed, and by whom
- what constitutes ‘underperformance’
- how doctors can provide feedback to their organisations
- how performance information is used
- who can access performance documentation
- issues of confidentiality and immunity.
Reviewed 29 November 2024