Methods for benchmarking the effectiveness of neurorehabilitation services

Understanding how effective healthcare services are is of interest to professionals, the people served and the broader community. While there is number of established approaches to measure how "good" or "bad" services are, the process of comparing clinical outcomes across services in the same specialism is more complex. This presentation will describe two approaches to benchmarking clinical outcomes in neurorehabilitation: norming, involving the comparison of routine measures of clinical outcome with external validators and stacking, which pools and compares internal data across several years. It will then discuss the potential advantages and limitations of each approach, and consider how the information garnered might be used, not only to evaluate service effectiveness, but also to inform quality improvement within the field of brain injury rehabilitation.