Croydon University Hospital 'one of the worst in country' at meeting patient needs (From Croydon Guardian)

Croydon University Hospital 'one of the worst in the country' at meeting patient needs

6:00am Friday 22nd March 2013 in Local news By Chris Baynes, Reporter

Croydon University Hospital

Croydon University Hospital is one of the worst in the country at meeting patient needs, according to a new report.

Only six hospitals in the UK were rated worse than Croydon's by consultancy MPH Health Mandate, which ranked NHS trusts according to patients' priorities.

The report, published last week, placed Croydon 140th out of 146 hospitals for overall performance.

The trust's lung cancer care was also rated poorly, placed 71st out of 82.

The rankings were compiled using aggregated data from a range of sources including patient and staff surveys, waiting times and complaints statistics.

St George's in Tooting was the only hospital in South-West London to fare worse than Croydon.

A spokesman for Croydon NHS Trust said the report was useful for understanding patient experiences but did not fully reflect clinical quality.

He said: "We recognise that the trust has to improve the experience that patients have when they use our services and we are working very hard to do so.

"We are increasing our numbers of nurses and consultants, and are in the process of improving the ratio of nurses to healthcare assistants on our wards to ensure that our patients receive more care from more highly qualified staff.

"We do feel, though, that while these indicators can be useful for understanding broader patient experience issues, they could potentially be misleading as they do not fully reflect the clinical quality of services.

He added: "Croydon Health Services has very good clinical outcomes for lung cancer and the results of the annual National Lung Cancer Audit 2012 show that the Trust has a figure for active treatment which is higher than the average for south London.

"While this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be improving the broader aspects of our care for lung cancer patients, it is important that patients are clear which hospitals are going to give them the best chance of surviving this debilitating disease.”