Health Bill [HL]

I accept that, and I will be pressing those questions on the next group of amendments. There is a real risk that quality accounts will, as the noble Earl, Lord Howe, said, turn into what I call PR guff. The NHS is getting better and better. If you visit an American hospital as a manager, as soon as you walk through the door you will be handed its PR guff. It usually starts with the heart transplant programme and goes on from there. It talks about all the great things that the hospital does and tells you absolutely nothing about what really goes on in the hospital. I worry that there is a potential problem there. I hope that patients are going to look at the website to see which orthopaedic surgeon they will choose out of those listed for a hospital, or whether they might go to another hospital because it has better outcomes. I certainly hope that that will happen eventually, but this is a start. I support the thrust of the amendments, which suggest that we need to be clear about what we include in the quality accounts that will make the difference to patients, clinicians and the system.