League tables measuring the performance and quality of health services should be introduced to capitalise on internal competition and drive service improvement, according to Professor David Kerr.

Kerr, who authored the ‘Building a Health Service Fit for the Future,’ report, which is often referred to as the “blueprint” for the NHS, told Holyrood that he thinks medical professionals should have the “courage” to share performance data with the public.

Kerr, who also works as a cancer doctor in Oxford said: “If I had a league table of cancer survival and so on, I think that I care enough about the quality of the service I deliver that I would like to be in the top 2 per cent of that, and if I wasn’t, I would be asking myself questions to see what I could do to redesign the quality of service I gave to get optimum outcome.”

Rather than relying on health boards to point out problems that have developed in services, Kerr says professionals could use the league tables, “to compete to make sure we are delivering a high quality service to our patients.”

Kerr argues that league tables would be a “more relevant and honest” system of measurement and would, “be much more effective for reform and improving outcomes than being told to meet targets.”

He also queried the current emphasis on “arbitrary” waiting list targets.

“The question you need to correlate with survival and outcome and moving things forward that way? I think the waiting times for non-life threatening operations were a huge inconvenience for people and had a huge effect on their quality of life and so I think that bringing waiting lists down has been a triumph for the successive governments. But I think if you look beyond it now, why get fixated?

“Waiting times are not a gauge of a quality service and therefore they need to reflect in another way about what they think the targets would be that would drive the delivery of services and keep the delivery up at peak level. Fiddling around the margins of waiting times, that won’t do that.”

In addition, he said that there are “probably too many health boards in Scotland,” adding that, “it would probably make more sense to simplify the number and that might improve the quality of proper geographic planning and so on,” and argued that there is a need for “positive and affirmative action” to close the health gap between rich and poor.

He said: “It is just socially inequitable and unsustainable Scotland is just disappearing in front of our eyes and we just can’t allow these generations to go lost and uncharted into an early grave. We must reach out if Scotland is to survive and be sustainable as a country.”

Related news items:

• 'Clear measures' announced to monitor health inequalities
• 'Don't let the flu turn on you' warns Scottish Government
• 'Health tourism' consultation launched by Scottish Governmen
• 'Radical rethink' of public services to tackle health inequa
• Aberdeen Dental School to boost Scottish dentist numbers