Overview

Performance measurement and evaluation are vital concepts of regulatory excellence. This includes how a college measures, analyzes and reports its performance against its strategic goals and regulatory activities. Additionally, it includes how a college identifies and assesses risks and how it uses the information to continuously improve its regulatory performance.

Collective strengths

Colleges reported that they are dedicated to transparently reporting on their performance against their strategic objectives and regulatory activities. Many colleges provide regular updates at council meetings using a variety of tools to communicate their progress (such as briefing notes, balanced score cards and dashboards).

The working group identified a notable practice by the College of Medical Laboratory Technologists of Ontario (CMLTO) regarding the use of a publicly available governance risk register. Approximately every two years the CMLTO’s Council reviews risk trends to update its governance risk register and to ensure there are no key gaps in its policy parameters or in actions council should be taking. The working group noted that the use of a risk-based approach drives regulatory effectiveness by clearly articulating the college’s role in understanding and addressing the current and emerging risks to clients/patients. Additionally, it was noted that regular review of regulatory and profession-specific risks can be done using both internal and system-level data and allows colleges to identify and proactively respond to risks to the organization.

System improvement

While the majority of colleges report performance outcomes, there is opportunity for greater consistency in how colleges communicate how regulatory performance is measured and how results are used to drive improvement. Key performance indicators can be more consistently identified, including why those particular indicators are important. Additionally, it is possible to better communicate how performance and risk review findings have translated into improvement activities.

Improvement commitments by colleges

Colleges made commitments to improve in the following areas:

  • development of and implementation of key performance indicators to measure performance against the strategic plan, for colleges using informal measures
  • implementation of a formalized approach to risk, as well as the use of risk-based data
  • development of formal processes for using the key performance indicator data to identify areas for improvement