The frightening fourteen failing trusts.

Before I start the important stuff, this is a brand new Blog and I haven’t worked out where it’s going or how it’s going to get there yet. For the next few days I’m going to pose some questions about how it’s going to go, on my old site;

helpmesortoutstpeters.blogspot.com

and I’m encouraging people to have their say about style, content, that sort of thing. Why not take a look at the problem and have your say, anyway you like.

OK, I got my act together to do some work on this – I took the trouble to track down the list of the 14 hospitals under investigation for having higher than expected death rates.

Then I took the recently disclosed ‘never events’, as exposed by BBC News and put the two together. No one else has done that, which seems odd to me.

Two, I couldn’t track down – I didn’t try that hard, sorry about that.

The 14 trusts, identified by the NHS Commissioning Board following the publication of the Francis report, are:

North Cumbria University Hospitals,

United Lincolnshire Hospitals, 12

George Eliot Hospital, 4

Buckinghamshire Healthcare, 5

Northern Lincolnshire and Goole Hospitals, 3

The Dudley Group of Hospitals,

Sherwood Forest Hospitals, 2

Medway, 4

Burton Hospitals 4

Colchester Hospital, 2

Tameside Hospital, 1

Blackpool Teaching Hospitals 2

Basildon and Thurrock University Hospitals 7

East Lancashire Hospitals. 1

 

(The numbers are those of the ‘never happen incidents’)

What’s interesting is that there are only two trusts where there is an obvious link; United Lincolnshire and Basildon and Thurrock. Each had dramatically bad figures.

The rest didn’t and some of the figures were not so bad. Then again 2 out of the 12 I had figures for is a 16.67% correlation. That is significant to me even if the more boring scientists out there would point out that it is also an 83.33% ‘non-correlation’.

If you add Buckingham with 5 it’s 25%.

It’s also possible that many of the ‘never events’ aren’t fatal so I think it’s a useful figure, to be used in combination with other outcome statistics.

The thing is, unless they alter the figures (that’s fraud folks), you can’t ‘game’ these statistics and if it highlights just a few failing hospitals it is going to save more than a few lives.

So, as an example, St. Bartholomew’s seems OK if you’re just looking at mortality rates until you look at the ‘never happen events’, then it all looks a bit worrying.

I’ve got a fascinating article/study into the frightening 14 which compares a number of factors as between the 14 and the rest. I’m having a bit of a struggle at the moment, when I feel better I’ll write it up.

Neil Harris

(a don’t stop till you drop production)

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