Making decisions about NHS healthcare
If your doctor refers you to a specialist, you can now choose where you would like to go for your treatment from a list of NHS hospital trusts and independent (private) hospitals that the NHS contracts to provide services for NHS patients.
- Deciding what matters to you
- Information to guide your choice
- How we can help
- Concerned about a trust's performance?
Deciding what matters to you
Deciding where to be treated involves weighing up a number of different things. The quality of care at a hospital comes first for many people, but there are also practical issues. For example, how easily can you get to the hospital, or if you are going to be an inpatient, is it close enough for family and friends to visit without a long journey? You may also want to know more about your condition and the kind of treatment you need before deciding, in which case your GP can advise you. And if you prefer, your GP can still choose the hospital for you.
Information to guide your choice
You’re making an important decision, so as well as general advice you need specific information that you can rely on. The NHS Choices website shows which hospital trusts offer the service you need, and the quality of their services for different conditions. You’ll also find useful practical details such as car parking facilities, local transport and visiting hours.
How we can help
As the independent regulator for health and social care, it’s our job to assess how well each NHS trust in England is performing against the Government’s standards for NHS healthcare. We do this every year and in a very detailed way, measuring the underlying quality of all of the trust’s services. We call this our “annual health check” of the NHS, and publish the results on this site.
You can see how well each trust is performing as a whole, and use this as a guide to the quality of treatment and care that patients receive. We also provide more detailed information about the trust’s performance. So if you want to dig deeper, you can find out where it is doing particularly well or where it might have problems.
We show how we’ve rated each trust for each of the last three years. This tells you whether the trust has stayed the same, has improved, or is not performing as well as in previous years. You can also find out how the trust scored when we asked recent patients to tell us about the quality of care they received.
Concerned about a trust’s performance?
You may be wondering what to do if you’d been thinking of using a particular trust but then saw that it didn’t do well in some of the areas we looked at. If this is the case, you need to decide whether they are areas that could make a difference to your particular treatment. For example, one of the many things we look at is whether NHS trusts take the public’s views into account when planning its services. If the trust that you’re considering using has not met the standard required in this area, you may feel that this probably won’t have a direct impact on your treatment. But some of the other things we look at may be important to you – for example, whether you would have a choice of food at mealtimes.
