'Staff don't need another stick to be beaten with'

摘要

We all love a listing. Many a weekend away now starts with a click on TripAdvisor to pick the hottest hotels and the coolest cafes. But transfer this idea to the NHS, as the Friends and Family Test has done, and I am not sure it gives a full picture of how well a department or trust can meet the patient's needs. In fact, many argue scoring hospitals in this way has proved counterproductive. Originally, net promoter scores (the basis for the Friends and Family Tests) were introduced to measure the success of private sector services. It was deemed useful to compare the customer service of, say, one high street bank with another. But there are all sorts of variable factors involved in a visit to, say, an accident and emergency department - how unwell the patient feels, how busy the department is, whether there has been a major incident and so on. I am not saying these variables should not be measured. Far from it - they can be a useful indicator. But we should remember those who score the trusts are self-selecting and so can skew the figures.