MORE than 10,000 patients at York Hospital have being sent surveys asking them how they are feeling.

The surveys are part of a new experiment to measure how well the hospital is improving its users' quality of life after their treatment.

Patients are asked to rate their health in a series of questions, including how much pain interfered with their work during the past four weeks, and how much of previous month they have felt "calm and peaceful" or "downhearted and low".

Hospital chairman Professor Alan Maynard, a health economist at the University of York, said: "It's a very important way of trying to find out whether patients are made better in terms of their mental or physical functioning by the procedure they undergo in hospital.

"We're always arguing as health economists at York that we should measure success. We tend to measure failure, we get into terrible distress about mortality and infection rates. But the majority of patients going through York Hospital don't die, don't have complications, but we really don't measure systematically whether we're improving their health.

"We want to know whether they get better - that's the simple bottom line of it."

Questionnaires are being sent out to people before they go into hospital for "elective" procedures - hip and knee replacements, for example - and another one is sent out three months afterwards.

It is hoped this will determine how a patient's health and wellbeing has changed since being treated.

The scheme, which started at York in June, is being run and paid for by a healthcare information company called CHKS, at no cost to the hospital.

York is currently one of four hospitals in the country which are taking part, and another is expected to join them.

So far in York, 7,000 surveys have been sent out to patients before their hospital treatment; 2,500 more have been sent out to people who have had their operation; and 850 have been fired off to patients who have been treated as emergencies after they have been discharged.

Patients are asked whether they are willing to take part in the scheme in a covering letter with their survey.

Heather Walker, from CHKS, said it was hoped at least 100,000 patients across all the participating hospitals would complete their surveys by the end of the three-year project.

The company is conducting the surveys at its own expense, in the hope that the idea will be taken up by the Department of Health.