Patients' rating of the quality of their NHS care will affect hospitals' and GPs' funding in England in the future, ministers have announced.

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The plans for the next 10 years were launched alongside an NHS Constitution setting out rights including speeding up assessments of new drugs.

The review was carried out by health minister and surgeon Lord Darzi.

Launching his report, which follows a 12-month review involving consultations with 60,000 patients and staff, he stressed how important quality of care was in the NHS, where-ever and however patients accessed it.

He said: "This is about giving more clout to patients, more say to patients.

"By measuring quality across the service and publishing that information for the first time, both staff and patients can work together to make better informed choices about their care."

Health Secretary Alan Johnson told the Commons: "We must have an unwavering, unrelenting focus on quality."

And he said there was aim was to bring "clarity to quality" and streamline the "morass" of existing standards.

However, Andrew Lansley, the Shadow Health Secretary, said the government had spurned an opportunity to create an NHS which was genuinely patient centred and evidence based, in favour of a system that continued to be very much bureaucractic and "top down".

"In place of vision, we get another list of initiatives: some old, some new, some borrowed, quite a lot of them blue."

How patients' assessment of quality of care is measured has still to be decided, but it is likely to have a major impact on how much money and NHS organisation receives.

For example, quality-linked funding could make up between £7-9m of the average district general hospital's budget of around £250m within a few years.

Information on the quality of a local hospital or GP practice's care will also be available on the NHS Choices website, and on clinical "dashboards".

One existing example in a London A&E displays regularly updated details of how soon patients are seen, assessed and get test results and about patient satisfaction.

Personal budgets

Lord Darzi also published a draft constitution setting out, for the first time, the rights of patients.

One of those rights is to all drugs and treatments approved by the National Institute for health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), and for new drugs to be appraised much faster, so decisions are issued within a few months.

In an earlier report, he proposed 150 GP-led health centres would be introduced across England, open 8am to 8pm, seven days a week.

These have been opposed by doctors' leaders who fear they will harm existing primary care provision.

This final report goes further in changing how GPs work, proposing to remove a minimum income guarantee for practices and linking funding to easy access and high quality care.

It also gives patients greater choice over which GP practice they use.

Lord Darzi's review also says all 15 million patients with long-term conditions will be given a personal care plan, and 5,000 of them will pilot new personal budgets.

A campaign urging people aged 40-74 to have their blood pressure and cholesterol checked will also be launched.

There will also be a review of doctors' training, focusing on their first two years after medical school.

(BBC)

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