Patients’ ratings of hospitals will be directly to the funding they receive from the government, under Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s plans to overhaul the NHS.
The Labour leader is set to unveil a 10-year plan for the NHS next week, in which he is expected to make the bold move.
Starmer is also set to link doctors’ and nurses’ pay to their success in bringing down waiting lists, as part of the massive revamp of the UK’s health service.
Under the proposed plans, NHS patients would be contacted several weeks after receiving treatment and asked if it was good enough for the hospital to get paid in full.
If the patient says no, roughly 10% of ‘standard payment rates’ are set to be diverted to a local ‘improvement fund.’
Pilot programmes of the scheme are set to be implemented within the next year at hospitals with a record of poor performance, the Times reports.
But senior health bosses are extremely concerned by the plans. Matthew Taylor, the chief of the NHS confederation, told the newspaper: ‘None of our members have raised this idea with us as a way of improving care and, to our knowledge, no other healthcare system internationally adopts this model currently.
He added: ‘Patient experience is determined by far more than their individual interaction with the clinician and so, unless this is very carefully designed and evaluated, there is a risk that providers could be penalised for more systemic issues.’
Health secretary Wes Streeting said that the public’s frustration with the NHS was rooted in its failure to listen to patients, along with a series of scandals that have rocked the service to its core.
He said: ‘We will reward great patient care, so patient experience and clinical excellence are met with extra cash.’
‘These reforms are key to keeping people healthy and out of hospital, and to making the NHS sustainable’, he added.
It comes as the new head of the NHS, Sir Jim Mackey, claimed that the health service sees patients as an ‘inconvenience’ and has ‘build mechanisms to keep them away.’
In his first interview since taking the role, Mackey chastised the NHS for being too often ‘deaf’ to criticism and having put in place far too many ‘fossilised’ ways of working that need to be updated for the 21st century.
Maternity wards are expected to be among the first parts of UK hospitals to be placed under the microscope, after Streeting launched a full review into services across the country, saying that women had been ‘ignored, gaslit [and] lied to’ by the NHS.
The latest proposals come following Streeting’s plans to give health bosses bonuses of 10% of their salary if they cut waiting times, while those who fail to solve the problem are set to be refused pay rises.