Gestionar elementos en cuarentena

fairs, 2007) has continued the eff orts started in the Common Language reform and has succeeded in establishing a national database with a variety of performance indicators. Municipalities are now required to deliver statistics to a national data- base. As a result, a number of indicators are published on the Statistics Denmark website including seven impact indicators (e.g., user time percentage), as well as 16 background indicators including the number of clients receiving home care. The overall purpose is to provide relevant information to politicians and other key decision-makers. While the Documentation Project was decided and mobilized by the parliament and ministries, it is important to note that many municipalities had already initiated a number of the indicators. The monitoring system is considered to be strict, in that municipalities are obligated to report to Statistics Denmark, although there are no bonus or sanction systems.

While performance management systems have been shaped by government re- forms, municipalities are also heavily engaged in the discipline (Bjørnholt, 2006). Below, we provide three examples to illustrate the variety of measures municipali- ties are using to improve the management of the area and satisfy government requirements. First, the measure of user time percentage has been introduced to document eff ective work time with clients. In practice, care workers are required to report the time spent and services provided at the point of care. The results enable politicians, both at the local and national levels, and other stakeholders to control service costs and service delivery. User time percentage has been included as an indicator in the national Elderly Care Documentation Project recently too, but has long (from before the Free Choice Program) been a key point of measure- ment in many municipalities. Other measures, such as the number of diff erent care workers per client, focus more on service quality. This specifi c measure is now also included in the national Documentation Project. Measuring user satisfac- tion is mandatory, meanwhile, even though it is up to each municipality to decide the questions in the survey. The purpose here is to provide information about the quality of elderly care from the user/client perspective. At a municipal level, there are also qualitative and municipality-specifi c measures at play. For instance, these are applied when the users are unable to answer quantitative questionnaires (e.g. those suff ering from dementia) or when more in-depth information is needed.

Overall, performance management systems have defi ned much of the public agenda and the organization of elderly care service provision. A variety of sys- tems and measures have evolved in a recursive relationship between national and municipal-level initiatives and interests. Nonetheless, the many procedures to control time, and to document the use of resources (supported by decree from the central government) have led to intense debate and struggles between stakeholder in the elderly care fi eld (Rostgaard, 2012). Led by the powerful DaneAge Associa- tion and trade unions, critics claim that the new management and performance approaches have taken elderly care off course with bureaucracy, the ‘tyranny of time’, de-motivated employees, and inferior services for the elderly. One of the central arguments has been that care workers currently spend too much time on

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administrative tasks instead of caring for clients (e.g., Andersen, 1999; FOA, 2008), refl ecting an institutional tension in elderly care between management logic and a more traditional professional logic. Despite this disagreement and criticism, use of performance systems appears to persist. At the same time, counter trends are in evidence: for instance some municipalities have introduced ‘zones free of control’ and projects aimed at empowering (as opposed to controlling) employees.

4.2 Performance Management in Park Services

As in elderly care, the need to improve effi ciency and focus on organizational performance has been an early feature of municipal park management through the implementation of New Public Management (NPM) tools – in the form of quality standards, provider–purchaser models, and frequent use of public procurement and outsourcing (Lindholst, 2009; Lindholst et al., 2015; Nuppenau, 2009). While developments in park services refl ect broader trends, there is no evidence of national government initiatives supporting this development. Table 2 provides an overview of three complementary systems which have been specially developed for park services performance management.

Table 2. Performance management systems in park services

Performance management

system

Main purpose(s) Performance

defi nition

Methods Monitoring

mechanisms Systems initiated at the national level

None

Systems initiated at the municipal level

Standardization Cost efficiency/rational

planning/requirement for management of internal of external arms-length relations Typically managers and consultants Quantitative (e.g., grass cutting or tree pruning).

Use market to test prices on predefined service levels Contractual logic, including eco- nomic penalties for defaults

Green Space Award Improve performance/

raise public and political profile (give account)

Managers, research and users, optional for applying for approval of a park for a Green Space Award (GSA) Qualitative/external inspection and judgment of a park against a predefined set of criteria Input to planning decisions/resource allocation Yardstick, Parkcheck Accountability through benchmarking against other organizations

Managers and con- sultants, based on a common system Quantitative/external measurement of a set of predefined performance indica- tors for organization and services

Input to planning decisions/resource allocation

The initial adoption of performance management was based on a sector-wide system for the standardization of maintenance operations (e.g., grass cutting or tree pruning), and for control over maintenance against expected service lev- els, as defi ned by a set of common standards. The system was developed in the late 1990s to provide a ‘common language’ for municipalities. It has been widely implemented by Danish park managers to address the need to improve internal

Three propositions about why characteristics of performance management systems converge across ...

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