Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are specific measures of performance in an area of practice. They are pre determined, quantifiable factors that measure progress towards quality goals. As such they also allow for long term monitoring of operational effectiveness.
In short they represent an ongoing audit of quality, clinical activity. Unfortunately there is a lack of standardised KPIs in the literature for pre hospital care. The Healthcare Commission defines four for the UK ambulance services, but these are all dispatch to arrival time related (except the fourth, which is time to thrombolysis) and have little to do with clinical care.
UK HEMS is actively pursuing some clinical bench marks and methods of reliably assuring them. These will be published on this site when available.