NOW in their third year, the government's hospital performance league tables - in which East Lancashire's NHS Trusts got improved five-star ratings - were under fire today .

Doctors, nurses and hospital managers blasted them as simplistic and misleading.

And even the official patients' watchdog in our region damned them as a waste of public money.

But, to us, it is not the need for accountability by our public services - not least one as vital as the NHS - that should be in question, but how useful it really is; in this case, as a valid picture of standards of care and as an incentive for improvements.

Looked at with that yardstick, then, it would seem that the league tables are crude measures of performance that need themselves to be improved - though not if it results in still more expensive bureaucracy in the NHS.

The first telling aspect of the tables' value is how, for instance, hospitals that are acknowledged world-famous centres of excellence can earn fewer star ratings than ordinary district hospitals - suggesting that what is being measured has more to do with quantity than quality.

And, of course, the scores on how quickly patients are assessed on arrival at a casualty department only tell how soon they received a quick look-over, not when they got actual treatment or how long they waited for a bed.

Nor do the league tables show how increased caseloads, together with what extra resources, if any, hospitals received to cope with them, might have influenced the scores.

And though the results may be better qualified in future by including patient death rates, they are still bound to be blurred by the fact that some patients will, in fact, be dying no matter what treatment they get.

The figures, then, are superficial and say more more about how quickly patients are treated, but not how well.

As such, they may be regarded more as a device for politicians to use with bias than as an accurate guideline for the NHS users.

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