NSW hospitals would be forced to publish their mortality rates or risk losing federal funding, the federal Health Minister, Nicola Roxon, said this week.

The Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, was "adamant" such criteria were made public in his plan to make states more accountable for public hospital performance, she said.

Unlike those in parts of Britain and the US, the Australian public is not entitled to know how each public hospital performs over a range of measures including infection control and surgery.

In an interview with the Herald on Thursday, Ms Roxon said a system of public reporting of measures including infection control and surgery was high on the Government's agenda.

"We are determined that we will be able to have transparent information about each and every hospital," Ms Roxon said. That included publishing mortality rates.

The Herald recently revealed complication rates for pacemaker implantation varied considerably across NSW hospitals but the NSW Health Department has refused to reveal which hospitals performed better or worse.

Evidence was also given at the Garling inquiry into NSW public hospitals that surgeons made "signature mistakes" in pacemaker implantation and their complication rates should be revealed.

But Ms Roxon stopped short of demanding public reporting of mortality rates for individual surgeons or complication rates for different types of surgery.

"We've got a fairly major task ahead of us to get all the … public and private hospitals into the same regime and agree on what all the measures should be."

She said the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare was advising on 41 key indicators of public hospital performance.

The states would have to co-operate: "If they want the funding, it's going to be part of the deal."