I was really surprised to see the University Hospital of South Manchester Foundation Trust listed in an Observer article as the sixth worst in the country.

University Hospital South Manchester is the new name for Wythenshawe Hospital, somewhere I’ve had several occasions to visit over the last few years.  In addition to a few visits for the kids’ cuts and breaks, I had an operation there a few years ago and my daughter was in for a week with suspected meningitis.

On none of those visits did I feel the standard of care and cleanliness was below par – generally I found it excellent.

And yet the Dr Foster Hospital Guide rates the hospital poorly on patient safety.

Just taking the personal experiences of my family is a poor way to judge a hospital – perhaps there are problems we didn’t happen encounter.  Statistics that look at the experiences of the thousands of people who use the hospital every year are much better.

If there are real problems, they need to be tackled – whether or not my personal experiences found them.  But we need to be careful about taking a bunch of measures, weighted and scored in a particular way, and assuming that tells the whole story.  Often small changes in the way the counting is done can make big differences to the outcome.

(And by the way – this is a particularly poor use of the phrase “postcode lottery” in the Observer – meaning nothing more than different hospitals score differently.  How could it have been otherwise?  Apart from anything else, the Dr Foster Guide would surely not have bothered with any scoring system where all the hospitals came out the same).

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