HAMPSHIRE Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (HHFT) is one of the top 20 trusts in the UK, according to a new league table.

The trust was ranked 19th out of 146 trusts included in The Quality Index, produced by healthcare analysts MHP Health Mandate.

According to its compilers, the index, based on “what matters most to people”, is the first overall assessment of NHS hospital quality in England based on patient needs.

HHFT, which runs Basingstoke, Winchester and Andover hospitals, was rated in the top quartile in three of the 10 categories.

It was judged to have a low risk of MRSA, a low number of patients who had their operation cancelled at short notice, and a high number of staff who would recommend being treated there to family and friends.

However, the trust was ranked in the lowest quartile for ‘the risk of being harmed at the hospital’, with a rate of 8.59 incidents of harm per 100 admissions between October 2011 and March 2012.

Chief operating officer Donna Green said the high figure ias a sign that hospital staff are good at reporting incidents.

She said: “We encourage our staff to report anything which is of concern to them, and everything which is reported will be investigated. It may be an incident or it may not be.

“You can look at it two ways – that having lots of incidents recorded is really good or really bad. We think it is a good sign because it shows that our staff are reporting everything.”

The categories on which hospitals were tested were based on a poll of more than 2,000 people around the country.

Respondents were asked to consider a situation where they needed a general, unspecified operation and to decide which factors would be most important in deciding where to be treated.

Nearly one quarter – 23 per cent – of respondents said the factor they considered to be most important when deciding which hospital to have an operation in was the number of patients who said that they had experienced a good standard of care.

One fifth of respondents – 20 per cent – placed greatest importance on how long they would have to wait for an operation.

NHP Health Mandate used these public preferences to work out individual ratings for each hospital trust.