The plan to introduce league tables is a simplistic, retrograde gimmick that will demoralise NHS staff – and sideline their incredible workRachel Clarke is a palliative care doctorSeriously, Wes Streeting? After 14 wretched years of Tory austerity, stealth privatisation, draconian outsourcing, the Brexit staff drain and the horror and trauma of Covid from which – as you know – staff haven’t remotely recovered, the big NHS plan is to be … naming and shaming? Complete with inflammatory language that’s designed to scapegoat staff, such as the bad managers you’ve branded the NHS’s “guilty secret”? Do you genuinely think this is constructive?At a point when Ofsted – having contributed to the suicide of headteacher Ruth Perry – has finally rowed back from its absurdly blunt tool of one-word school inspection ratings, it beggars belief that the new health secretary thinks hospital league tables will help the NHS. Streeting insists the new public rankings are a necessary way of stamping out poor performance. He wants hospitals judged on quantifiabl