Named and shamed: 29 NHS trusts have excess deaths, claims eminent professor who helped expose the Mid-Staffs hospital scandal (so is your local trust one of them?)
- MailOnline last week named 13 trusts in England that had excess deaths in 2017
- But Professor Sir Brian Jarman fears the true figure is higher than the NHS says
- He recalculated the NHS Digital data for MailOnline – and found 16 extra trusts
More patients are dying than they should be at 29 NHS trusts, claims an eminent hospital death rates expert.
MailOnline last week named and shamed the 13 health service-ran organisations across England that recorded excess deaths in 2017.
But Professor Sir Brian Jarman, who helped expose the Mid-Staffordshire hospital scandal, fears the true figure is much higher.
He recalculated the NHS Digital data for MailOnline and found a further 16 trusts ran by the health service fall into the excess deaths category.
According to his analysis, there were 6,800 more deaths than expected at hospitals ran by the 29 trusts – significantly more than NHS estimates of 3,700.
Blackpool Victoria Hospital, ran by the Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS FT, has been flagged up for having excess deaths every year since 2014
The County Hospital is ran by Wye Valley NHS Trust, which was named as one of the 13 NHS trusts with excess deaths in 2017
WHERE WERE THE 29 NHS TRUSTS THAT PROFESSOR SIR BRIAN JARMAN FOUND HAD EXCESS DEATHS?
The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust
Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust
South Tyneside NHS Foundation Trust
Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh NHS Foundation Trust
United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust
James Paget University NHS Hospitals Foundation Trust
Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Colchester Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust
Wye Valley NHS Trust
University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust
Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust
Southport and Ormskirk Hospital NHS Trust
Dorset County Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
Hull and East Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust
Southend University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Royal Devon and Exeter NHS Foundation Trust
The Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust
Kettering General Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
North West Anglia NHS Foundation Trust
Mid Essex Hospital Services NHS
Isle of Wight NHS Trust
Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust
Basildon and Thurrock University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Norfolk and Norwich University Hospitals Foundation Trust
East and North Hertfordshire NHS Trust
East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust
The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust
Trusts in bold also fell under the excess deaths category by NHS Digital
Chiefs warn the data is only a ‘smoke alarm’ and only warrants the need for further investigations to examine the cause of the excess deaths
NHS Digital releases its Summary Hospital-level Mortality Indicator (SHMI) data every summer for the previous year.
It collected the data from 134 hospital trusts between January and December last year and then statistically analysed the results.
There were around nine million discharges, from which 294,000 deaths were recorded either while in hospital or within 30 days of discharge.
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The findings were supposed to have been published last month, but officials had to push the date back. The reason behind the delay is unclear.
In the NHS report, 103 trusts reported no excess deaths and 18 even had a lower number of fatalities than expected.
The data showed slightly less than a tenth, or 9.7 per cent, of NHS trusts reported higher than expected deaths.
WHAT WAS THE MID STAFFS SCANDAL?
A disputed estimate suggested that hundreds of people may have needlessly died at Stafford Hospital, ran by Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust, due to poor care between 2005 and 2009.
In what is one of the worst care scandals in living memory, anecdotes provided by Julie Bailey, who was responsible for exposing neglect at the hospital, suggested patients were left lying in their own excrement and had been so thirsty that they were reduced to drinking water from vases.
The Francis report, the inquiry into the hospital’s workings in 2013, found that box ticking bureaucrats prioritised targets over basic levels of care.
But not a single individual will be prosecuted in connection with the scandal, police admitted last year – despite a three-year investigation.
Stafford Hospital has been renamed County Hospital, and is now run by a different trust.
They included Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS FT, South Tyneside NHS FT and Wye Valley NHS Trust, which have all had excess deaths since 2013.
Chiefs warn the data is only a ‘smoke alarm’ and only warrants the need for further investigations to examine the cause of the excess deaths.
But Professor Jarman’s recalculation of the data shows more than a fifth of NHS trusts, or 21.6 per cent, have deaths higher than expected.
He used the internationally recognised system, recommended by the Association of Public Health Observatories, called Byar’s confidence intervals.
A similar process helped uncover poor care at the Mid Staffordshire trust, which was at the centre of one of the biggest scandals to ever hit the NHS.
However, the NHS uses another method, called overdispersion, which gives trusts slightly more leeway in terms of recording deaths.
Under that system, a trust is regarded as having a higher than expected number of deaths only if its SHMI is about 12 per cent or more above the national average.
In contrast, the Byar’s method is used internationally and classifies a much higher proportion of trusts as being significantly above the national average.
Professor Jarman told MailOnline: ‘I don’t consider it is appropriate to give some additional “leeway” to hospitals, if it leads to the Care Quality Commission considering the 16 trusts I have listed as having “no problem with mortality”.
Professor Jarman said the NHS had used the internationally recognised Byar’s confidence intervals in the past.
Until January 2012 it was used in tandem with overdispersion. But the Byar’s method was then dropped, with bosses at NHS Digital, saying it was confusing to have two systems running at once
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