Six more NHS trusts on warning.

 

This is another NHS watchlist of failing hospitals – there are, of course, other indicators to watch out for as well. The last paragraph is a sign that things may be getting better.

Denis Campbell, health correspondent

theguardian.com, Wednesday 29 January 2014

 

Six hospital trusts are under fresh scrutiny after new NHS data revealed that more patients who had been treated there died during their stay or soon after.

 

Two of the six, Colchester Hospital University NHS foundation trust and East Lancashire Hospitals NHS trust, are already in special measures following NHS medical director Professor Sir Bruce Keogh's inquiry last year into 14 trusts with apparently high death rates.

 

Another of the six, Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS foundation trust, was also among the 14 but was not among the 11 put into special measures.

 

The NHS's Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) on Wednesday said that those three, plus Mid Cheshire Hospitals NHS foundation trust, Aintree University Hospital NHS foundation trust in Liverpool and Wye Valley NHS trust in Herefordshire, all had unusually high death rates in 2012-13, as judged by the summary hospital-level mortality indicator (SHMI).

 

The SHMI is one of the key ways of measuring if a hospital trust is seeing an average, higher or lower than average number of deaths among patients. It is one of four mortality indicators used by the healthcare information specialists Doctor Foster Intelligence to produce its influential annual hospital guide.

 

The SHMI captures and compares the number of patients who die while being treated as an inpatient or within 30 days of their discharge from hospital.The six were found to have "higher than expected" mortality rates under the SHMI.

 

The HSCIC explained that "the SHMI is the ratio between the actual number of patients who die following treatment at the trust and the number that would be expected to die on the basis of average England figures, given the characteristics of the patients treated there".

 

The centre was asked in 2010 by the Department of Health to develop the SHMI and publish data based on it after concerns were expressed that the hospital standardised mortality ratio (HMSR) was too crude and inadequate at capturing the complexity of hospital mortality rates.

 

The HSCIC stressed that its new SHMI data should not be taken "as a standalone verdict on a hospital trust's performance".

 

Overall hospital death rates as judged by the SHMI appear to be improving slightly, the new data show. Between July 2012 and July 2013 a total of nine trusts had a "higher than expected" SHMI value, two fewer than the year before, while 17 trusts had a "lower than expected" SMHI value, up from 16 a year earlier.

Neil Harris

(a don’t stop till you drop production)