NHS fury at Streeting's trust league table plans

Wes Streeting plans to publish a football-style league table of the best and worst performing hospitals, prompting fury from NHS bosses and staff at struggling trusts being "named and shamed".

- Denis Campbell

The health secretary will announce the move today to an audience of health service chiefs and defend it as a "tough" but necessary way of raising care standards.

"There will be no more turning a blind eye to failure," he will say at the annual conference of NHS Providers, which represents England's 220 NHS trusts. "We will drive the health service to improve, so patients get more out of it for what taxpayers put in."

The league table will be based on key metrics such as how long patients have to wait for A&E treatment, surgery and other care, the state of the trust's finances and also how good its leadership is judged to be.

Streeting hopes to have it ready to be published by the start of April.

Healthwatch England, the service's patient champion, said the league table would help tackle the wide variation in the quality of care patients received from different trusts and individual services, depending on where they lived.