Rotten Ratings

As is natural for a member of a government which gauges the value of a hospital mainly according to the price of its real estate, the Minister for Health and News Corporation has been trying to find a convenient way of summing up and doing down the NHS in a nice, simple, tabloid-headline fashion. Equally naturally, Jeremy C Hunt has hit upon the idea of league tables, as favoured by his Cabinet colleague and fellow Murdoch flunkey, Michael Gove. The Nuffield Trust, which was commissioned to look into the possibility of a rating system so crude that even Jeremy C Hunt could comprehend it without a surgical intervention, has reported back rather gently that hospitals are complicated institutions in which performances can vary widely over different departments. Hence, attempting to sum up an entire hospital in a single score would give an inaccurate impression of the hospital's performance, would do nothing to improve patient care and would fail to detect burgeoning problems. It would be rather like trying to gauge the collective wit and intelligence of the Cabinet by including meetings where nobody turned up, thereby leading to a radical overestimate of the quality of the dialogue. Anyway, having commissioned the report, Hunt will of course pay no attention to it whatsoever. As with Twizzler Lansley's Health and Social Cleansing Act, the medical profession is opposed and the BMA has warned of staff demoralisation and a detrimental effect on frontline services; so in the strange little world of Jeremy C Hunt, all is as it should be.