The coronary heart group will be led by Professor George Alberti, president of the Royal College of Physicians, and the mental health group by Professor Graham Thornicroft from the Institute of Psychiatry.

The two are forerunners of next year's national league tables for hospital care, announced in the wake of the Bristol baby heart operations scandal.

Twenty-nine babies died in heart operations at Bristol Royal Infirmary. The government believes measuring hospital performance on operations will drive standards up.

Unacceptable variations in care

The mental health and heart disease blueprints are based on standards set up for treating cancer.

Frank Dobon pledges an improvement in care

"Too many times in the past both patients and the NHS have been let down by unacceptable variations in care. I am determined to shape an NHS which can offer people in all parts of this country services of the highest quality," said Health Secretary Frank Dobson.

The government is also to invest £1.2m in a database on effective treatments for coronary heart disease and a research project into women with the disease.

This extends the British Heart Survey, which covers middle-aged men. Seven thousand women a year die of heart disease before they are 65, compared with 18,000 men.

Lung cancer

There is also new guidance on treating lung cancer, which kills 30,000 people a year. Ninety per cent of deaths are thought to be linked to smoking.

Eighty per cent of people diagnosed with lung cancer die within a year and it is one of the forms of cancer which has shown little improvement over recent years.

The government is advising doctors to use more chemotherapy and other forms of radiotherapy to combat the disease. It also wants them to perform more operations on patients where this is appropriate.