Hospital league tables produce highly questionable rankings for the purpose of creating an artificial market in the NHS, and must be opposed, argues Graham KirkwoodIn November last year, the UK Labour government announced there would be a new set of NHS hospital league tables compiled from a range of performance criteria. In a landmark paper published in 1996, Harvey Goldstein and David Spiegelhalter critiqued the use of league tables in education and health. Goldstein and Spiegelhalter list a number of issues with such measures of ‘quality’, including the social and political considerations in the choice of measures used to quantify quality. Competition is being embedded in the NHS at every level and just as in education, a pseudo market in NHS hospitals created. Unions representing doctors, nurses and other hospital staff need to come out against these unreliable and unscientific league tables.