'Zagat-style' guide will rate hospitals

Ministers are planning the first "Zagat-style" user's guide to the NHS, which will rate hospitals and GP practices on the basis of comments from patients.

Star ratings could be given to the most popular NHS establishments in the same way as guides to eating out rank restaurants on the number of positive responses they receive.

More than 6,000 comments from patients on individual NHS trusts have been recorded on the NHS Choices website. The scheme is due to go live next year with a TV campaign and dedicated website that patients will be encouraged to use to rate the service they received.

Lord Darzi, Health minister and a practising surgeon, said the move was a part of the drive to improve quality in the NHS, set out in his "next stage" review, published last summer.

In the US, the international restaurant rating company Zagat, has teamed up with WellPoint, an American health insurance company, to allow consumers to rate their doctors.

Lord Darzi said: "We will have a Zagat-style guide here. We plan to do that as part of the NHS, providing a guide to hospitals and GP practices. In my hospital [St Mary's in London] there could be a Zagat rating for the colorectal service, in which I work."

The UK guide would differ from the US Zagat version because ratings would not be provided for individual doctors, but only for the services of which they were a part. "We are not going to rate individual doctors – high quality medicine is a team effort now. Modern medicine is not about individuals any more. It is no longer Professor Darzi and three others [surgeons]. It is a team thing – we follow the same protocols. There will be a Zagat-style guide but not to individuals – that is irrelevant," he said.

Lord Darzi said patient experience would be only one element in the assessment of NHS performance in the future, as set out in his report. Others were patient safety, such as hospital infection rates, and clinical outcomes, such as whether a patient with a broken hip could walk again.

"That is the bit they get wrong in the US – they don't have the clinical outcomes data. Those websites [which rate doctors] are based purely on patient experience."

The minister was speaking to The Independent during a visit to an NHS trust in Essex, one of dozens he has made to promote the agenda set out in his report to drive up quality. If successful, by 2010 about 3 per cent of an NHS trust's income, worth £7m-£9m for the average district general hospital, will depend on the safety and effectiveness of care and patients' satisfaction with it.

The minister was accompanied by David Nicholson, chief executive of the NHS, who toured a state-of-the-art community hospital being built under the PFI scheme. He also visited Broomfield hospital, which has one of the lowest MRSA rates in the country.

Mr Nicholson said: "A big part of the Darzi report is about giving patients more clout. If people know they have a three times higher chance of being readmitted [because of complications] after treatment at one hospital than another, that is very important information to have. The NHS is in a unique position to act as a testbed for these measures because it is a universal service."

Asked if a consumer guide should not name individual doctors, he said: "It's the team that makes the difference, not the individual. The days of the heroic surgeon, like Sir Lancelot Spratt, are long gone."

A spokesman for Which?, owner of the Good Food Guide, said: "We are all for more patient feedback. This is something we have been calling for."

NHS What the patients think

*Scarborough General Hospital in North Yorkshire. Six comments posted – four positive.

Fred1966 says: "I have had anappointment to see a cardiologist cancelled five times. I went for tests last February and I am still waiting."

*The Royal Marsden Hospital in London. One comment. Khadija said: "I was treated with a lot of care and attention. The Arabic translators were very helpful. [But] the day unit is always very busy which results in delays of treatment."

*The Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital, Stanmore. Five comments – four positive, three critical of the food. Anonymous wrote: "The care was faultless. The nursing staff were amazing. [But] The hospital is incredibly run down and not that clean. The food was completely inedible."

*Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham. Fifteen comments, most positive. One wrote: "How can chemotherapy waits be running two hours late at the start of the day, and you are the first person to be seen?"