Welsh health minister Jon Owen Jones has launched the country's first set of clinical indicators for hospitals.

League tables show how hospitals have performed on each of three indicators, focusing on deaths and discharges after emergency admissions.

Mr Owen Jones said that in the wake of the babies' heart surgery scandal at Bristol Royal Infirmary,'hospitals and hospital doctors need to know these figures - so do patients and their GPs'.

But doctors attacked the charts. Dr Bob Broughton, Welsh secretary of the British Medical Association, said: 'Crude figures are at best unhelpful and at worst seriously misleading.' Without more information about case mix, the tables would encourage 'misplaced criticism', he said.

Gwynedd Hospitals trust had the worst rate of deaths following emergency admissions for heart attack, at 22.8 per cent, while at Ceredigion and Mid-Wales trust only 13.5 per cent died.

Deaths of patients with hip fractures admitted as emergencies varied from 4.1 per cent at Glan-y-Mor and 9.6 per cent at University Hospital of Wales.

Bridgend and District trust discharged 65 per cent of emergency hip fracture cases within four weeks, but Wrexham Maelor trust managed only 35 per cent.

Topics