Magee Helen, Davis Lucy-Jane, Coulter Angela
Picker Institute Europe, King's Mead House, Oxpens Road, Oxford OX1 1RX, UK.
J R Soc Med. 2003 Jul;96(7):338-42. doi: 10.1258/jrsm.96.7.338.
Patients on certain waiting lists in the UK National Health Service (NHS) are now offered the choice of persevering with their home hospital or switching to another hospital where they will be treated on a guaranteed date. Such decisions require knowledge of performance. We used facilitated focus groups to investigate the views of patients and members of the public on publication of information about the performance of healthcare providers. Six groups with a total of 50 participants met in six different locations in England. Participants felt that independent monitoring of healthcare performance is necessary, but they were ambivalent about the value of performance indicators and hospital rankings. They tended to distrust government information and preferred the presentational style of 'Dr Foster', a commercial information provider, because it gave more detailed locally relevant information. Many participants felt the NHS did not offer much scope for choice of provider. If public access to performance information is to succeed in informing referral decisions and raising quality standards, the public and general practitioners will need education on how to interpret and use the data.
英国国家医疗服务体系（NHS）中，处于某些等候名单上的患者现在可以选择坚持在其本地医院就医，或者转至另一家医院，并能确保在某个既定日期接受治疗。做出此类决定需要了解医疗服务表现情况。我们通过便利焦点小组来调查患者及公众对于公布医疗服务提供者表现信息的看法。六个小组共50名参与者在英格兰的六个不同地点进行了会面。参与者们认为对医疗服务表现进行独立监测是必要的，但他们对表现指标和医院排名的价值态度不一。他们往往不信任政府提供的信息，而更喜欢商业信息提供商“福斯特医生”的呈现方式，因为它提供了更详细的本地相关信息。许多参与者觉得NHS在提供医疗服务提供者选择方面的空间不大。如果公众获取表现信息要成功地为转诊决策提供依据并提高质量标准，公众和全科医生将需要接受关于如何解读和使用这些数据的教育。
