The Government is creating a website where the public can publish their views on hospitals and doctors. Patients will be able to "review" the performance of their GP or hospital to help others decide where they should go for treatment.

The aim is to force those doctors, consultants and managers subject to bad reports to improve their performance, the Department of Health said last night. But doctors said the idea was "gimmicky".

NHS reforms have prompted countrywide campaigns against hospital and NHS service closures. But central to the reforms has been patient choice, a Department of Health spokesman said yesterday.

"The NHS does amazing things every day," she said. "We want people to put down their views. Good or bad, we want an honest review of the services they have received. "It's all feeding into patient choice and patients ranking and rating their GPs. It will bring up standards of those that are not so good because they won't be getting such good feedback." Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, is to announce tomorrow that the new website should be up and running by the summer. The patient ratings are due to sit alongside Government ratings of hospital and primary care trusts.

The British Medical Association said the website will attract those who want to complain. Hamish Meldrum, chairman of the BMA's GPs' committee said: "This seems a little bit gimmicky and superficial and rather typical of this government's policy.

"People tend to go to these things when they have complaints rather than when they are satisfied so it may tend to favour the complainers rather than those in favour."