Our health and care system has access to a variety of data to support effective decisions from a local to a national level. Unfortunately, poorly presented data leads to inappropriate responses. Determine the right measures for your learning system, alongside existing programme measures.
Data and measurement have various uses:
Measurement for accountability – judge how a system is performing, usually against a stated standard
Measurement for research – data used to develop new generalizable knowledge
Measurement for improvement – using specific system related data to support decisions about where to focus improvement work and/or to measure whether the changes introduced are resulting in improvement
Effective analysis, evaluation and decision making should use both qualitative and quantitative data. Making sense of the data is an important next step to support decisions about what to do next.

Consider the following questions:
- What is the purpose of the learning system?
- What types of data are required to support learning?
- How can the data be used to promote effective decision-making?
- How can we use the data to:
Understand what needs to be improved, understand variation, support PDSA testing, monitor progress, tell our story?