The harsh truth about ISTCs - The Guardian 30th October 2007

The policy director of the King's Fund should be able to do better than repeat the government's unfounded claims about independent sector treatment centres (Letters, October 26). First, patient satisfaction surveys, such as the Healthcare Commission's, which she says show satisfaction with ISTCs to be "significantly higher than with NHS providers", are an unsatisfactory index of quality. Patients treated by ISTCs are lower-risk than NHS patients and less likely to have difficult recovery experiences - and the differences claimed are small, anyway. At a minimum, the extensive evidence which exists of poor-quality clinical performance in some ISTCs should be set against the results of patient satisfaction surveys.

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