The Hospital Guide

“The Hospital Guide has consistently provoked debate and, more importantly, action to improve quality of care.” - Tim Straughan, Chief Executive, The NHS Information Centre for Health and Social Care

Dr Foster was set up to empower patients and improve transparency in healthcare. This is why we produce the Dr Foster Hospital Guide, an annual publication for consumers, clinicians, managers and organisations. The Guide, now in its eleventh year, benchmarks the performance of every hospital trust in England. Until the Guide was first published in 2001, there was no way for anyone to see how well or how badly a hospital performed, or to compare its performance with another hospital. Publishing this data and making it public was a revolutionary idea that has been widely credited with helping to raise standards of care.

The aim back then, as today, was to publish independent and authoritative analysis of the variations that exist in acute hospital care in a way that is meaningful for clinicians and managers and understandable to patients and the public. Information is based on analysis of admissions data (by the Dr Foster Unit at Imperial College London) and a Department of Health-approved questionnaire which almost all NHS trusts complete.

Over the years we have published many new indicators for the first time across the NHS. These include Hospital Standardised Mortality Ratios (HSMRs) in the first guide in 2001 (a metric we have continued to publish each year) and the Agency for Healthcare Research Quality’s patient safety indicators in the 2010 guide.

The 2011 Hospital Guide explores a range of issues: 24/7 care across the NHS, including weekend working; best practice in stroke care and orthopaedics; patient safety; and a look across four indicators of mortality. It can be downloaded by clicking on the image below. All the underlying data for every hospital trust incuded in the Guide is also published on drfosterhealth.co.uk.

Previous editions

The last five editions of the Hospital Guide are available for download in PDF format:

View the full methodology for the latest Hospital Guide at drfosterhealth.co.uk