Wiltshire has been ranked in the UK’s top ten per cent for choice offered to patients needing an outpatient hospital appointment.

The national patient choice survey carried out for the Department of Health in March showed that 76 per cent of patients in Wiltshire were treated at a hospital where they had asked to go, compared with 67 per cent nationally.

Forty-seven per cent knew they had a choice of hospitals before they visited their GP, the same percentage as the rest of the country.