Move towards 'more detailed' hospital performance indicators

Patients should get more detailed assessments of how services in individual hospitals are performing and have access to more real-time information, the Care Quality Commission (CQC), which scrutinises patient care, announced yesterday. The move comes after the health watchdog found "systematic failings" last year that led to poor nursing care, filthy wards and a lack of leadership at Basildon and Thurrock University NHS hospitals foundation trust. It was estimated this had led to the deaths of up to 400 patients a year. The new proposals will be seen as a way of picking up such failings much earlier than the current ratings scheme. Patients' groups had raised concerns about death rates at Basildon and Thurrock hospital trust in 2008. But an internal investigation failed to find anything wrong, and managers dismissed the concerns. The CQC said it would be moving away from producing overall scores for health trusts to a system where "assessments will be scored separately to provide detailed information about the quality of specific areas of care [because the] rating for large organisations can be misleading as it could hide variations in the quality of different services provided, eg stroke or maternity services." The public consultation document says the watchdog "needs to move from a focus – particularly in the NHS – on annual, retrospective ratings to a more dynamic and ongoing view of the quality of care". Cynthia Bower, chief executive of the CQC, said patients' views were paramount in the new scheme. "We will listen carefully to what people who use services tell us about their care, and will hold those in charge accountable when that care falls below par. What people also want and need from the regulator – whether it's someone who uses care services, a chief executive of a large care organisation, or those organisations that performance-manage care quality – is clear, meaningful information."