Blair defends hospital rating system
The Prime Minister has defended the Government’s rating system for NHS hospitals.
Addressing MPs this lunchtime, Tony Blair said that the use of a range of performance indicators in assessing the star rating of NHS trusts was “fully justified”.
He insisted that the public had a right to know how individual trusts were performing in their local areas.
Mr Blair’s comments come as the Department of Health announces that four of the UK’s top tier NHS trusts seeking foundation hospital status have had their grading drop to two stars as part of the annual performance assessment.
The Commission for Health Improvement (CHI) adjudged Aintree Hospitals, Essex Rivers Healthcare, Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals and Walsall Hospitals no longer worthy of three-star status.
Consequently, they will lose out on obtaining semi-autonomous foundation status in April 2004.
Under the Department of Health’s radical agenda, foundation status allows NHS trusts to bid for extra money to fund services.
The four hospitals missed the opportunity due to a variety of reasons. Long A&E waiting lists, inefficient complaint procedures, cancelled operations were highlighted in particular.
On a more positive note, Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust and West Suffolk Hospitals NHS Trust both saw their ratings improve year-on-year.
The trusts shot up from one star to three.
Responding in the Commons this lunchtime, the Tory leader Iain Duncan-Smith dismissed the controversial ratings system as a “gimmick”, accusing the Government of distorting hospital performance to fit politically-motivated targets.
In its annual assessment, CHI granted three-star status to 53 hospitals compared to 45 last year, building on the government pledge to bring democracy to the NHS.
The number of zero star hospitals increased from 10 to 14.
Some consider the ratings patently fraught with subjective interpretation.
Liam Fox, Tory health spokesman, said: “The star ratings system is ludicrous and should be scrapped. The ratings bear no relation to the quality of care that patients are receiving.”
But rejecting such criticism, Health Secretary Dr. John Reid insisted on the independence of the assessments, maintaining that they were becoming ‘tougher year on year:’
‘And although these are tougher standards, more hospitals are meeting them; 35% of all hospitals now are in the top three star rating and 75% in the top two rating, so that is an indication of the improvement’, the Health Secretary said in a BBC radio interview this morning.
‘Four additional hospitals fell down into the no-star rating; three times as many went up into the three star rating. So the general picture is one of improvement’.
And he insisted that the ‘very tough standards’ would get tougher ‘year on year’ and therefore, if a hospital did well this year, there was still the incentive to improve the service for patients next year.
He added: ‘If we don’t have any way of knowing who is doing what and how well hospitals are doing, we can’t identify those that we need to help and one of the reasons that we have this is to inform patients:’
