All of England’s worst-performing hospitals are today named and shamed in a damning Government analysis.

This marks the first instance where the Government has publicly assessed hospitals, ambulance services, and mental health providers, enabling patients to identify those delivering inferior care.

Health secretary Wes Streeting claimed the move would ‘end the postcode lottery’ of care and pinpoint where urgent help is required.

Leading hospitals will be granted increased autonomy and investment opportunities, whereas senior managers at consistently underperforming NHS trusts may face salary reductions, according to the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC).

NHS executives will also have the chance to receive additional compensation for intervening in struggling trusts to facilitate improvements, while those ranking in the middle will be encouraged to emulate top-performing trusts to boost their standings.

While patient advocacy groups welcomed the introduction of league tables, hospital trust leaders expressed concern about the potential for staff to bear undue blame.

The rankings identified Mid and South Essex Foundation Trust as the lowest-performing large hospital, closely followed by Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust.

As for smaller hospital trusts, Queen Elizabeth Hospital, King’s Lynn NHS Foundation Trust, along with Countess Of Chester Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, were noted as the poorest performers.

Birmingham Community Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, meanwhile, was ranked bottom of the table for community hospitals. 

The ranking scores are based on a range of measures, including finances and patient access to care, as well as bringing down waiting times for operations and A&E, and improving ambulance response times.

The majority of the top 10 best-performing hospitals were specialist trusts.

Moorfields Eye Hospital took top spot, followed by the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital NHS Trust, and The Christie NHS Foundation Trust.

The best-performing large hospital trust is Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, which ranked at number nine.

Mr Streeting said: ‘We must be honest about the state of the NHS to fix it. Patients and taxpayers have to know how their local NHS services are doing compared to the rest of the country.

‘These league tables will identify where urgent support is needed and allow high-performing areas to share best practices with others, taking the best of the NHS to the rest of the NHS.

‘Patients know when local services aren’t up to scratch and they want to see an end to the postcode lottery—that’s what this Government is doing.’

Separate tables were also published for ambulance trusts, with the East of England ranked the worst. 

From next summer, the tables will be expanded to cover integrated care boards, which are responsible for planning health services at a local level, and wider areas of NHS performance.

Sir James Mackey, chief executive of NHS England, said giving patients access to more data ‘will help to drive improvement even faster by supporting them to identify where they should demand even better from their NHS’.

However, Danielle Jefferies, senior analyst at The King’s Fund, warned that ‘a single ranking cannot give the public a meaningful understanding of how good or bad a hospital is’.

‘Whether NHS trust league tables will be helpful to the public is questionable, because hospital performance is not as simple as good or bad,’ she said.

She added that while tables can be a ‘helpful tool’, a single ranking ‘hides the variation in performance across different departments within the same hospital’.

It also ‘hides the variation in performance that can exist across the multiple hospital sites that are often run by a single trust’, she argued.

Chris McCann, deputy chief executive of patient group Healthwatch England, said: ‘People want clarity on how their local NHS is doing, and they’ll welcome anything that makes that easier to understand.

‘But if a service is struggling, transparency must come with accountability. Patients need to know what’s being done to fix the problem, and when it will improve.’

Daniel Elkeles, chief executive of NHS Providers, added: ‘There’s more work to do before patients, staff and trusts can have confidence that these league tables are accurately identifying the best-performing organisations.

‘For league tables to really drive up standards, tackle variations in care, and boost transparency, they need to measure the right things, be based on accurate, clear and objective data and avoid measuring what isn’t in individual providers’ gift to improve. 

‘Then they will drive improvement and boost performance.’

It comes as latest NHS monthly data for England revealed the number of people in England waiting for routine hospital treatment has surged for the first time since March. 

More than 7.37million treatments—relating to 6.23million patients— in June were in the queue for ops like hip replacements.

This included over 190,000 people stuck in limbo for at least a year, often in pain. 

Separate NHS monthly performance data today also revealed around 1,000 patients faced waits of at least 12 hours in A&E every day in June. 

Health secretary Wes Streeting claimed the move would ‘end the postcode lottery’ of care and pinpoint where urgent help is required

By Wes Streeting, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care

Anyone who follows football knows league tables don’t lie. They expose success, failure—and fans know exactly where their team stands.

For too long, the NHS has had no such clarity. Patients and taxpayers have been left in the dark about whether local services are delivering or failing. With no accountability, success has gone unrewarded and there have been no consequences for failure.

Refusals to be honest about the state of the NHS partly explains the appalling state it was left in by the previous government. I’m not prepared to turn a blind eye to failure. You can’t cure an illness without accurately diagnosing it first.

Today we’re delivering on our promise to publish league tables, ranking every NHS trust in England and we’re going to update it every three months. 

This is a huge step-change in the way the NHS operates and key to the reforms we’re driving forward through our Plan for Change.

Patients depend on the NHS, taxpayers pay for it, and both deserve to know how their local services are doing. Now they will.

Where trusts are shown to be underperforming, they will receive greater support and targeted interventions to up their game. 

Trusts with the greatest challenges must accept more scrutiny and targeted support to identify weaknesses and strengthen their game.

Today’s reforms are about driving better performance and delivering better value. If you’re at the top of the league, providing great care and living within your means financially, my message is to press down on the accelerator. 

You’ll be given freedoms from central micromanagement to do just that, including keeping budget surpluses to reinvest in new kit and buildings. 

The rest of the NHS will learn lessons from the leading providers, taking the best of the NHS to the rest of the NHS.

Middling NHS leaders will be incentivised to up their game and rise up the table – senior managers will be rewarded with bonuses for cutting waiting times and getting better value for money. 

Those at the bottom of the table will receive greater support and targeted interventions to turn them around. Managers will be held to account and will have their pay docked if they don’t show improvement. 

The best NHS leaders will be offered higher pay to take on the toughest jobs, sending them into challenged services and turning them around. 

People in these roles have lives in their hands, so I am willing to pay for the best.

This isn’t about shifting the blame for failure and scapegoating local staff. They can only be as good as the system they’re working in, and the NHS has been unreformed for too long. 

The buck stops with the government, and we will be judged on whether we have turned the NHS around by the next election.

We have invested an extra £26 billion this year to begin rebuilding the NHS. But alongside that investment we promised reform to get better value for taxpayers’ money, and that’s what we’re delivering today.

A patient at Countess of Chester shouldn’t have to wait months longer for treatment than one in Northumbria. 

That is the postcode lottery I’m determined to tackle, by raising standards across the board.

These reforms build on successes already delivered, including cutting waiting lists by over 250,000 since July, delivering almost 5 million extra appointments, and recruiting 2,000 extra GPs to the frontline.

The job is far from done. Waiting times remain too long, and too many patients still feel they are battling the system to get the care they need.

Patients deserve the best, wherever they live.

So, whether you’re in Scunthorpe or Stevenage, Bradford or Bognor, Carlisle or Chipping Norton, these league tables will get the NHS raising its game and delivering better care.

Because when it comes to the NHS, every patient deserves top of the table care.