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VFM's Impact

 

All studies undertaken as part of our VFM programme should have lasting benefit to the audited body and the taxpayer, either through improved service delivery, financial savings or improved governance.  Examples of the types of benefits are provided below.

 

Our reports lead to financial impacts. These arise when the Office has established, and the relevant departments have agreed, that a recommendation has either reduced the resources employed to achieve the objectives, improved efficiency or effectiveness or increased revenue. They include direct cash savings, efficiency improvements (where more or better quality outputs are achieved a given amount of resources) and improvements in revenue collection.

 

Some examples of benefits from our work

 

Financial impacts:

  • Savings for the consumer through better pricing
  • Recovery of revenue
  • Detection of fraud

 

Qualitative improvements:

  • More patients treated within timescales
  • Raising awareness of benefits available

 

Improving governance and processes:

  • Payments processed quicker
  • Improved procurement

 

Providing assurance

  • Assuring Parliament, government and the taxpayer about how public resources have been used

 

Additional outputs

 

Another way of having an impact is to generate some form of additional output. The list below summarises some of the additional outputs that our work may generate:

 

  • Conferences and seminars – some study teams organise conferences as a way of informing a wide number of stakeholders of the findings and recommendations of the study.  We can do this either through holding our own conferences or through speaking at conferences held by others.  Seminars for interested parties or within the Department are also useful.
  • Good practice guides – short pieces of guidance, sent to individual staff members or offices can be a good way of making sure that the findings are seen by all staff, rather than simply managers and policy leads. 
  • Feedback reports – feedback reports are a useful way for one delivery body to see how they compare against their counterparts.  Our report on Neonatal Services (HC101, 2007-08) was accompanied by individual feedback reports for all neonatal networks, showing how their performance rated against the sector as a whole.