The Healthcare Commission is committed to making a real difference to the delivery of healthcare and to promote continuous improvement for the benefit of patients and the public. In England, one of the ways we do this is by assessing and reporting on the performance of healthcare organisations on an annual basis. For NHS trusts, this involves issuing an annual performance rating.
The overall performance rating of an NHS trust is made up of a number of performance indicators. Performance indicators show how trusts are doing in relation to some of the main targets set by the Government for the NHS, as well as other broader measures of performance. They include information from surveys of staff and patients, and other measures useful to patients and carers.
Ratings do not provide a comprehensive picture of every aspect of the performance of NHS organisations. In particular, in their current form they do not include many measures of the outcomes of healthcare treatment (for example, whether there are variations between trusts in the quality of treatment or care for specific conditions). They are unlikely, on their own, to provide the information a patient would need to make choices about their treatment.
This website holds all information related to the Healthcare Commission's performance ratings for 2004/2005. Information is divided into sectors and listed in the left navigation menu on all pages.
You can search by using the trust name, advanced search or geographic search above, or you can click on a ratings link in the left side of the page if you know your trust type (acute, ambulance, mental health or primary care).
You can download the results of all trusts, which will allow you to compare the rating for different trusts
The NHS performance ratings system places NHS trusts in England into one of four categories:
If a trust has a low rating because of poor performance on a number of key targets and indicators, this does not necessarily mean that a hospital is unsafe, that it does not contain some very good clinical services or that the staff are not working hard in often difficult circumstances. It does mean that performance must be improved in a number of key areas.
In February 2005, the Healthcare Commission made the decision to exclude the results of all clinical governance reviews (or the follow up of action plans, where more appropriate) from the performance ratings for all organisations in 2004/2005. This decision reflects feedback received from strategic health authorities and trusts. The Healthcare Commission continues to support the importance of clinical governance and this is reflected in the core standards assessment that will form part of the Healthcare Commission's annual health check in 2006 and beyond.
Combined trusts (those that provide services in more than one sector) will be performance rated in all relevant sectors. You will, therefore, need to refer to the indicator lists for each relevant trust type (e.g. primary care and mental health, or acute and mental health and ambulance).
As in 2004, the three specialist learning disability trusts will not be assessed as part of the 2005 performance ratings. The ratings published for these trusts in 2003 were based on a limited subset of key targets and performance indicators on mental health because no specific performance indicators on learning disability were available. The Healthcare Commission is working on the development of suitable indicators, and has included new indicators on learning disability in both the PCT and mental health provider sets. However, these indicators are not sufficient to permit a robust assessment to be made of the performance of specialist learning disability trusts and further indicators will not be available in time for the assessment of performance in 2005.
A quick way to find out how to use the site and understand the information.