Bupa has hit out at private hospitals for not publishing care quality measurements to match those from NHS trusts.
Addressing chief executives of all the UK's private hospitals, the move could be viewed as the first significant attempt to target the private healthcare sector since the Office of Fair Trading announced a review of the market.
A letter signed by Dr Andrew Vallance-Owen, group medical director, and Dr Natalie-Jane Macdonald, managing director of Bupa Health and Wellbeing, called on hospitals to be more transparent about their clinical quality metrics by publishing them in the same way the NHS does.
They found it hard to understand why the provision of clinical quality metrics remains so elusive in the private sector and concluded that the ethos of the private sector must be to encourage fair competition and enable informed choice by patients and commissioners.
The provider said it was prompted to contact private hospitals following the publication of this year's Dr Foster Hospital Guide, which includes a report card for every NHS hospital trust.
Trusts must produce figures detailing their effectiveness in:
- Preventing people from dying prematurely;
- Enhancing quality of life for people with long term conditions;
- Helping people to recover from episodes of ill health or injury;
- Ensuring people have a positive experience of care;
- Treating and caring for people in a safe environment and preventing avoidable harm.
They are then rated red, amber or green when compared to the performance of all trusts generally.
Dr Macdonald argued that patients were losing out in the process which she suggested was part of a marketwide agreement.
"Apart from very limited clinical information on the links to individual hospital websites, there is almost no comparative data to help patients compare private hospitals with others in the private sector, or the NHS," she said.
"As no private hospitals have a report card published in the Hospital Guide we presume there must be an agreement across the private hospital sector not to produce clinical data for this or similar publications.
"We believe that private hospitals must publish this type of information in time for the production of next year's Dr Foster Guide and also be much more engaged in the collection of patient reported outcomes on private patients to enable proper comparisons within the private sector and with the NHS and importantly, to demonstrate the excellent standards of care in the private sector," she added.
