What's Measured Is What Matters¶

BEVAN, G., & HOOD, C. (2006). What's Measured Is What Matters: Targets and Gaming in the English Public Health Care System. Public Administration, 84(3), 517-538.

Type: Journal article
Intellectual base: Primary research
Year: 2006
Volume: 84
Issue: 3
Pages: 517-538
ISSN: 1467-9299
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9299.2006.00600.x
DOI registrant: Wiley
Link: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.2006.00600.x
Cited from: economics_finance

Cited by¶

2 citations across 2 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes¶

Goodhart's Law
- The proxy climbs impressively while construct-correlated independent measures — twelve-hour trolley waits, delayed-sepsis mortality — fail to improve in proportion and in places diverge.
  This sourceDocuments target-driven gaming in the English NHS (including A&E waiting-time targets) — output distortion, threshold/boundary gaming, and reclassification while headline metrics improve and unmeasured quality does not — and draws the Soviet-target/GDP parallel.
  
  Supported in partVerified against the publisher's abstract
  
  The abstract backs the frame — NHS 'reported successes' alongside 'problems of measurement, and gaming' — but names no trolley-wait or sepsis measure.
  
  “We examine the robustness of the regime of targets and terror to these assumptions using evidence from the English public health service on reported successes, problems of measurement, and gaming.”
  From the publisher's abstract.
  
  Read by an automated reader; not a human review. How support was checked

Domain-specific¶

Campbell's Law
- Healthcare — surgical mortality league tables incentivize patient selection over better surgery; readmission penalties incentivize reclassification over better discharge.
  This sourceDocuments reclassification and patient-selection gaming of staked health-care and public-sector targets.
  
  Supported in partVerified against the publisher's abstract
  
  Abstract supports gaming/measurement problems in English public health targets, not the specific surgical mortality or readmission penalty mechanisms.
  
  “problems of measurement, and gaming”
  From the publisher's abstract.
  
  Read by an automated reader; not a human review. How support was checked

Verification¶

Does it exist? Confirmed. This work's DOI resolves to a registered record, which fixes its identity. That is all it fixes.

Does it back the claim? Read against the text for 2 of 2 citations: 2 supported in part. Each verdict is shown under its citation below, with what in the work backs the sentence.

Support is checked per citation rather than per work — the same source can be cited soundly in one article and wrongly in another. Per-citation recording began recently, so a citation with no recorded check is a gap in the record rather than evidence it went unchecked.

See how references were verified.

Registry ID ref:6a63a828a87b · see in the full table