NHS considers publishing GP performance data

They told the NHS Confederation Conference that they believe this would provide benefits for the health service and patients. Professor Sir Bruce Keogh, medical director of the NHS,said that more data should be published on GPs' performance, given health secretary Andrew Lansley's plan to give them more control over care commissioning. "We're going to look very closely at this," he said. Although there are not such obvious measures for GPs as for surgeons, he said there are some indications of a family doctor's quality, such as how accurately they spot symptoms that warrant a patient's referral to a hospital's cardiac service. Keogh said the publication of more performance data, such as success rates for surgical teams, improves results but has traditionally been opposed by medical professionals. He said that Florence Nightingale had established league tables of surgical work in London hospitals well over a century ago, but these ended with her death. Changes in the relationship between doctors and patients should now ensure that performance data will be published in the future. "The main driver, in my view, is information technology," he said. The ability for individuals to access and process data cheaply "will soon drift into healthcare," with many patients already searching for health information online. Keogh said that earlier projects, such as on the performance of heart surgeons, had generated complaints about inaccuracies – but these were due to trusts failing to keep good records. In future, the department will insist that service leads sign off the data before it is released. He dismissed the idea that publication of data damaged patient care, saying that the evidence was that the reverse was true, and results improved. Although some surgeons might try to avoid hard cases that would damage their results, publication also discourages them from what he called "cowboy" behaviour, such as carrying out unnecessary operations. "I believe putting it in the public domain will force quality up," he said. Some questioners doubted whether disadvantaged people would have the capacity to make use of open data. But Keogh said that previous work had suggested they may make more use that other groups, as such people tend to be sceptical of authority. "They will use this information perhaps more than we expect, more than is intuitive," he said. His message was reinforced by Marlene Winfield, director for patients and public at NHS Connecting for Health, who told the session that she believed the NHS should give patients access to a very wide range of data. This should include their personal records and performance measures for NHS organisations and clinicians, including outcomes, waiting times, infection rates and ability to park at sites. "We don't yet live in a grown-up world in the NHS," she said. "We don't treat our patients as grown-ups." Winfield added that the poor adoption of the MMR vaccine showed that the medical profession had done a bad job of explaining risks, and the public had not managed to interpret them. She said that opening data would have other benefits, with aggregated information on patients able to provide an early warning of dangerous treatments.