Revealed: 36 hospital wards where care is so bad patients would warn loved ones to stay away

Doctors and nurses have been warned by David Cameron that ‘standards are not good enough' after one in three patients said they would not recommend their local hospital to family and friends.
The Prime Minister said the new test would give a single measure for the quality of NHS care across the country.
The first set of results revealed patients in 36 hospital wards across England would not recommend them to loved ones.

Care: David Cameron said the new Friends and Family Test would expose areas where healthcare is poor

The first wave of the ‘Friends and Family’ test also saw one English A&E department get a ‘negative score’ - at Chase Farm Hospital, part of the Barnet and Chase Farm Hospital NHS Trust, in north London.
Patients are simply asked whether they would recommend the hospital where they were treated to their loved ones.

Each hospital is then given a score based on patient satisfaction levels - if every single patient says they would be ‘extremely likely’ to recommend the service the ward would receive a score of 100, if every single patient said they would be ‘neither unlikely nor likely’, ‘unlikely’ or ‘extremely unlikely’ to recommend the service, the trust receives a score of minus 100.
Mr Cameron, who is on holiday in Portugal, said: ‘I am determined to give patients a far greater voice within the NHS as a way of highlighting the best and worst of care within our hospitals.

Health minister Anna Soubry claims the Mid-Staffs scandal could have been prevented if the test had been in place

‘With the 'Friends and Family' test, we now have a single measure that looks at the quality of care across the country.
‘I want the NHS to put patient satisfaction at the heart of what they do and expect action to be taken at hospitals where patients and staff say standards are not good enough.’
Health minister Anna Soubry suggested that the test could have highlighted earlier the Mid-Staffs NHS scandal, in which up to 1,200 people died needdessly as a result of poor care.
She told BBC News: 'We are clearing away some of the smokescreen, some of the systems that prevented people from knowing what's actually happening in their hospitals.
'People in Stafford had known what was happening in their hospital had they been listend to then hopefully some of those people that died wouldn't have died if people had taken proper action considerably sooner.'
More than 400,000 NHS hospital inpatients or A&E attendees completed the test during April, May and June.
NHS England will now publish monthly updates to ensure patients can regularly give feedback about the care they receive.
By the end of next year, NHS England hopes to roll the test out to include GP practices, community services and mental health services. All other services will be included by April 2015.
Tim Kelsey, NHS England's national director for patients and information, said: ‘This is the boldest move yet to promote real openness in the NHS and to concentrate our focus on improvement in care.
‘At the heart of Robert Francis's report into the tragedy at Stafford hospital was one basic message: to ensure the NHS delivers high quality care for all, we need transparency of the patient and carer experience. It is the absence of this transparency that often allows poor care to go undetected.’
But Jocelyn Cornwell, director of new patient charity the Point of Care Foundation, said the data are ‘not meaningful’.
She said: ‘The way in which the data for the friends and family test is collected varies widely and is open to gaming.
‘People who respond are not part of a random sample, but are self-selecting or, worse, are encouraged to respond by staff.
‘Clearly there is a temptation for staff to encourage responses from patients who they feel will respond positively, especially as a positive result is linked to financial reward.’

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