14 DAY TRIAL // Many believe that the public could use performance information to make a choice regarding their health care providers and this will actually lead to a better quality of health care in general, but Martin Marshall and Vin McLoughlin from The Health Foundation, seem to think otherwise.
The two believe that the choice patients make has a very weak change of changing anything in the health care system, and they also offer solutions to this problem.
They stress that currently available information can be improved and its effect on people optimized, because the public “has a clear right to know how well their health system is working, irrespective of whether they want to use the information.”
Several ways in which the available performance data could be more useful, include a very reliable source of that data, information that would be interesting to a specifically targeted audience and that would also be presented in an attractive way to the public.
All patients should first know the way that the NHS works, before making any performance judgment, and joining personal stories will only make the numerical data more convincing.
Marshall and McLoughlin, base their affirmations on research carried out over the past 20 years in many countries, that contradicts the belief that most patients will choose the most 'fashionable' health care units.
Furthermore, the patients rarely look for information, understand it or believe it, and they are not likely to use it as a criterion to choose their health care provider.
The two authors publishing their analysis in a paper on bmj.com, said that “in this paper, we present a significant challenge to those who believe that providing information to patients to enable them to make choices between providers will be a major driver for improvement in the near or medium term.”
“We suggest that, for the foreseeable future, presenting high quality information to patients should be seen as having the softer and longer term benefit of creating a new dynamic between patients and providers, rather than one with the concrete and more immediate outcome of directly driving improvements in quality of care.”