The government has published “league tables” for NHS hospitals in England for the first time.
Wes Streeting, the health secretary, said the quarterly rankings will pinpoint where urgent support is needed and help end the “postcode lottery” of care for patients.
But experts have questioned the helpfulness of the tables, warning that hospital performance is “not as simple as good or bad”.
Experts at think tanks including the King’s Fund and Nuffield Trust have warned the new tables are of “questionable” and “limited” use to patients.
Among the lowest ranked hospitals is Lucy Letby’s former trust, The Countess of Chester Hospital Foundation Trust.
The rankings score trusts based on a range of measures, including finances and patient access to care, as well as bringing down waiting times for operations and A&E, and improving ambulance response times.
The list is divided into three sections: acute trusts, non-acute trusts (mental health, learning disability and community), and ambulance trusts.
The lower the score, the better the performance.
Here is a full list of the new league tables for NHS trusts in England:
Acute Hospitals
Top performers will be given greater freedoms and investment, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said.
Under the plans by the DHSC, higher standards will also be set for leaders, with pay tied to performance.
Senior managers at trusts that are persistently ranked poorly could see their pay docked, while NHS leaders will have extra pay incentives to go into challenged trusts and turn them around.
Meanwhile, those in the middle will be encouraged to learn from trusts at the top to help them improve their rankings.
Mr Streeting said: “We must be honest about the state of the NHS to fix it. Patients and taxpayers have to know how their local NHS services are doing compared to the rest of the country.
“These league tables will identify where urgent support is needed and allow high-performing areas to share best practices with others, taking the best of the NHS to the rest of the NHS.
“Patients know when local services aren’t up to scratch and they want to see an end to the postcode lottery – that’s what this government is doing.”
From next summer, the tables will be expanded to cover integrated care boards, which are responsible for planning health services at a local level, and wider areas of NHS performance.
Sir James Mackey, chief executive of NHS England, said giving patients access to more data “will help to drive improvement even faster by supporting them to identify where they should demand even better from their NHS”.
However, Danielle Jefferies, senior analyst at The King’s Fund, warned that “a single ranking cannot give the public a meaningful understanding of how good or bad a hospital is”.
“Whether NHS trust league tables will be helpful to the public is questionable, because hospital performance is not as simple as good or bad,” she said.
Daniel Elkeles, chief executive of NHS Providers, which represents NHS hospitals, said: “There’s more work to do before patients, staff and trusts can have confidence that these league tables are accurately identifying the best-performing organisations.
“For league tables to really drive up standards, tackle variations in care, and boost transparency, they need to measure the right things, be based on accurate, clear and objective data and avoid measuring what isn’t in individual providers’ gift to improve. Then they will drive improvement and boost performance.”
