Tim Tenbensel

Tim Tenbensel is a professor of health policy at the University of Auckland. His research addresses how health policy is implemented and how the performance of health services is assessed.

Tenbensel and colleagues studied New Zealand’s six-hour emergency-department target using data from four hospitals, alongside interviews and surveys. Their 2017 paper distinguished reported emergency-department length of stay from a broader measure that also included time in short-stay units. Reported stays continued to fall after the target was introduced, while the broader measure did not fall further after 2010. The researchers also found early improvements in patient flow; their findings do not mean that every shorter reported stay was merely a transfer of waiting time.

His work is relevant to OutcomesLab’s examination of measurement boundaries: when a target is met, what happened to the outcome experienced across the whole care pathway?