Institutions in healthcare, education and other public services are under constant pressure to perform to high standards and with efficiency. Assessment of their performance is often problematic because it either ignores important background variables of their patients, students or clients (the casemix), or adjusts for them in a way that is not equitable or transparent. We apply a method of indirect standardization motivated by the potential outcomes framework, in which we consider the hypothetical scenario of an institution's case‐load being dispersed for treatment throughout the domain of assessment (the country's institutions). The target of estimation is the difference of the means of the outcomes in the realized and hypothetical settings. The method is applied to estimating the prevalence of bronchopulmonary dysplasia in extremely preterm‐born infants in the neonatal units and their networks in Great Britain in 2017. The prevalence of bronchopulmonary dysplasia is an audit measure in the UK National Neonatal Audit Programme.

中文翻译：

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绩效评估作为因果推理的应用

医疗保健，教育和其他公共服务机构不断面临要求高标准和高效执行的压力。评估他们的表现通常是有问题的，因为它要么忽略了患者，学生或客户（案例组合）的重要背景变量，要么以一种不公平或透明的方式为他们进行调整。我们采用了基于潜在结果框架的间接标准化方法，其中考虑了假设情况，即机构的案件量分散在整个评估领域（国家机构）进行治疗。估计的目标是在实际和假设的情况下结果均值的差异。