Moorfields Eye Hospital - "Weak"

[Barney]

Very disappointing to see the Healthcare Commision recently giving Moorfields the lowest possible score for overall quality of services. See here... Described as 'Weak', this places Moorfields with the lowest scoring 8.8% of hospital trusts throughout England.

Moorfields describes itself as a leading ophthalmic hospital so does that mean that ophthalmic departments in other hospitals provide equally poor services? Moorfields is a specialist Foundation Trust yet another specialist Foundation Trust only a few miles away gets top scores for both quality of care and for financial management. Foundation Trusts have more financial freedom than other NHS trusts that is supposed to allow them to be more responsive to needs.

Is there some reason why a hospital specialising in ophthalmology should do so badly compared with other specialist hospitals and is there a general problem with ophthalmic care?

[jayuk]

Moorefields is no longer regarded the global leading eye institution it once was!...it has been in decline for some time now; but some still use its name in high regard on legacy reputation......Very sad but very true.....

[Vic]

One thing that disapointed me slightly about the HC report was that it was very superficial - it gave each hospital two 'ranks' (or in some cases, a group of hospitals if several fall under the same trust, which makes it even less specific) but there was no more in-depth feedback on individual departments. So I wonder how useful a tool it really is to patients - within that overall ranking of 'weak' there may well be depts within a hospital that are actually good, and some which are extremely bad, but there is no way of identifying which is which. it's interesting to have a ballpark figure though as to how hospitals are faring.

[Andrew MacLean]

Its odd how the ratings given to hospitals can vary so widely from year to year.

I have never been sure about the benefit of publishing this information, although as a 'consumer' I am keen to know how my local hospital compares to others.

Is it possible for people who are patients at a "weak" hospital simply to transfer to a "strong" one?

Andrew

[Barney]

Jay, do you have any thoughts about why standards at Moorfields might have declined?

I don’t know how easy it is to transfer Andrew and those assessments don’t give a breakdown of how departments within hospitals perform. City Hospitals Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust gains the highest rating of "Excellent" but there's no data relating specifically to its eye unit. We don't know how well it performs or compares to other services within what's clearly a very good hospital.

One of the report’s criticisms made of Moorfields is that it fails to "ensure that staff concerned with all aspects of the provision of healthcare are appropriately recruited, trained and qualified for the work they undertake." For that it receives the lowest possible score placing it within the lowest 2% of trusts throughout England.

Can't help wondering if the lack of trained staff is connected with the huge rise in laser surgery for short-sightedness in the private sector which may be causing a lucrative diversion from more serious eye conditions. It’s noticeable that “Laser eye correctionâ€Â

[GarethB]

I think this is where sites such as this come into their own as we post what is good and bad about the vareous centres we visit.

What better measure of a hospitals performance than the voice of the customer.