Hospital league tables risk sapping NHS morale | Letters

Pury Sharifi says tick boxes cannot measure continuity and compassion, while Alison Vaspe says naming and shaming is not the answer. Plus a letter from Sue StephensonRe Rachel Clarke’s article on Labour’s plans to introduce hospital league tables (Wes Streeting, you must have a better plan for ailing hospitals than public humiliation, 13 November), I left the NHS during Labour’s introduction of the “value for money” policy in the health service pushed forward by Tony Blair. I worked in a very deprived area in London as a psychotherapist when Labour became besotted with performance targets. The test of how successful we were “to get people back to work”, which was given uppermost importance, was spread across several pages of tick boxes, which we were expected to fill out for every patient.There was nothing on the so-called evaluation form about demographics of the patients, their socioeconomic and unemployment levels and degree of the trauma present in the population we were serving. Continue reading...