How good is your local NHS hospital? Here’s how to find out

The NHS league tables were launched last year but have now been updated to cover an extra 1,000 consultants – in total there’s now 5,000 consultants listed – and 13 survey areas.

Consultants

Patients can search for specific operations and see the mortality rates for consultants in their area. The data also shows whether the mortality rate is within the expected range, and the number of operations carried out by each consultant.

Hospitals

Patients can search and order NHS hospitals in England on inspection ratings, mortality rates and even quality of food.

Adult social care

Each local authority in England is ranked on service user’s quality of life, carer and satisfaction and admissions to care homes, amongst other statistics.

The website also allows patients to search data on public health services and mental health hospitals.

NHS England’s medical director Professor Sir Bruce Keogh who has championed better transparency in the NHS, said the website will help to drive up standards.

“This represents another major step forward on the transparency journey,” he said.

“It will help drive up standards, and we are committed to expanding publication into other areas. The results demonstrate that surgery in this country is as good as anywhere in the western world and, in some specialities, it is better.”

But critics said the move to publish surgeon’s performance data is “crude and misleading”.

John MacFie, president of the Federation of Surgical Speciality Associations, which represents surgeons, said: “There is now good anecdotal evidence that shows publishing this data has encouraged risk-averse behaviour, which is not in the interest of patients.

“I believe that the data should only be published after any concerns in a surgeon’s performance have been investigated.”

Work to compile the data has again been led by the healthcare quality improvement partnership, which manages the national clinical audit programme on behalf of NHS England.