Hospitals: Standards
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what comparative assessment he has made of the efficiency (a) rural and (b) urban hospitals; and how many hospitals in each of those categories are within the top quarter most efficient hospitals.
Answered by Karin Smyth
As part of the 2025/26 planning process, all National Health Service organisations were required to set efficiency and savings targets necessary to achieve a balanced financial position. These targets are publicly available in hospital board reports. The Department and NHS England do not assess hospital performance based solely on efficiency. Instead, the NHS Oversight Framework (NOF) measures NHS trust and foundation trust performance across a range of metrics. These reflect the delivery of NHS priorities, including performance against targets like reducing wait times for electives and accident and emergency, and improving ambulance response times.
The NOF assigns trusts to four equal-sized performance categories called ‘segments’. NHS England has also recently published newly developed league tables to bring greater transparency to NHS performance at a provider level.
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