Best and worst-performing NHS trusts in England named in new league tables

League tables of the best and worst-performing NHS trusts in England have been published by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) for the first time.

Health Secretary Wes Streeting said the quarterly rankings will pinpoint where urgent support is needed and help end the “postcode lottery” of care for patients.

However, experts have questioned the helpfulness of the tables, warning that hospital performance is “not as simple as good or bad”.

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.

Trusts are categorised in four segments, with the first reflecting the best performers and the fourth showing the worst.

Top performers will be given greater freedoms and investment, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said.

The majority of the top 10 best-performing hospitals were specialist trusts.

Number one is Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, followed by the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital NHS Trust, and The Christie NHS Foundation Trust.

The best-performing large hospital trust is Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, which came in at number nine.

Among the worst-performing trusts are Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust, Greater Manchester Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust, Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, and Devon Partnership Trust.

Birmingham Community Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust was ranked bottom of the table.

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.”

Writing in the Daily Mail, Mr Streeting said trusts at the top of the tables need to “press down on the accelerator” and would be “given freedoms from central micromanagement”.

“When it comes to the NHS, every patient deserves top-of-the-table care,” he said.

It comes as the British Medical Association (BMA) announced that doctors in their first year of training in England are to be balloted over the prospect of industrial action over a lack of places for doctors in training.

The union has called for an increase in the number of training places.

Expanding the number of training places could also form part of ongoing talks with the Government as ministers and the BMA’s Resident Doctors Committee try to break the stalemate in the ongoing row over pay.

Separate tables have been published for acute, non-acute and ambulance trusts.

The top performer is North West Ambulance Trust, followed by East Midlands Ambulance Trust, and Yorkshire Ambulance Trust.

East of England Ambulance Trust was ranked the worst.

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.

She added that while tables can be a “helpful tool”, a single ranking “hides the variation in performance across different departments within the same hospital” and also “hides the variation in performance that can exist across the multiple hospital sites that are often run by a single trust”.

Chris McCann, deputy chief executive of Healthwatch England, said: “People want clarity on how their local NHS is doing, and they’ll welcome anything that makes that easier to understand.

“But if a service is struggling, transparency must come with accountability. Patients need to know what’s being done to fix the problem, and when it will improve.”

Daniel Elkeles, chief executive of NHS Providers, added: “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.”

The new league tables follow the publication of an NHS England online dashboard which aims to give the public more information on how local health services compare.

Trusts are ranked by seven measures of performance including waiting times, cancer treatment, time patients spend in emergency departments and waits for diagnostic tests.