The Health Secretary has recently announced plans to publish public league tables that will rank NHS Trusts. The aim is to create more consistency in the quality of across different Trusts, with a focus on improving patient care and outcomes.
How will NHS Trusts be ranked?
The league tables will look to rank the hospitals on care delivery, finances, A&E wait times, surgery and leadership. These changes will focus on better management within the NHS, with plans to deny pay rises to senior leaders if improvements are not made and to fire managers in Trusts that consistently perform at the bottom of the league table.
How will this improve the care received in the NHS?
There will be incentives for the best leaders to go into Trusts ranking at the bottom of the league tables, helping these Trusts to move up the league tables. There are also plans to carry out deep dives on poor performing hospitals that can identify issues and work to solve them and to send in teams to help failing Trusts make these improvements.
Furthermore, those Trusts that sit at the top of the league table will be give more freedom over spending, with hopes that they will spend the money on cutting wait times and improving their facilities, creating a better patient experience.
What are the potential disadvantages?
There has been lots of criticism for the plan to rank NHS Trusts, especially from those working in the NHS. There is a fear that these league tables focus on the wrong aspects of the NHS, particularly the focus for the Trusts to operate with a budget surplus.
The league tables could risk demoralising the staff in NHS hospitals and could create issues with recruiting and retaining staff in poorly performing areas, making it harder for them to provide the care that the patients need. In addition, there are concerns that the league tables could cause the more serious issues in the NHS to be overlooked, as Trusts may focus on meeting ranking targets rather than addressing underlying problems.
Trusts that are struggling to reach demand are doing so because of underfunding, too few staff and high demand for care in the area due to high population and poor health. The league tables could damage patients’ confidence in these Trusts, leading patients to avoid seeking care at lower-ranked facilities. This could damage the Trust in the NHS as a whole.
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By Caitlin Brown, graduate paralegal
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