Indicators of clinical performance

Abstract

Last week, Baroness Jay announced that Britain's Department of Health, in association with the BMA, intends to publish measures of clinical performance. This means that, in future, potential patients can find out, for example, the percentage of patients admitted to their local hospital with a heart attack who die in hospital within 30 days, or how many undergoing prostate surgery have a second operation. Although similar information has been available in Scotland for several years, until now published league tables in England have been confined to indicators of managerial performance, such as waiting times. The theory is simple. Those hospitals that are shown to be performing worse than others will either improve their practices or lose patients, who, advised by their general practitioners, will go elsewhere. In practice, however, health care is rarely so straightforward. Two questions arise. Firstly, is the information meaningful and does it distinguish good performance from bad? Secondly, will it …