Death rate
in English
hospitals
‘higher than in US’

Patients in NHS hospitals in England are 45 per cent more likely to die in hospital than patients in the USA, according to figures compiled by an eminent doctor and statistician.

Professor Sir Brian Jarman – who invented the hospital standardised mortality rate (HSMR) measure which helps identify under-performance in hospital trusts – tracked hospital death rates in seven countries over more than a decade.

He found that in 2004, England was the worst out of the seven, with 22.5 per cent higher death rates than the average and 58 per cent higher than the best performer – the US.

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Prof Jarman told a Channel 4 News NHS special programme that all of the countries have since improved – the UK faster than some. But 2012 figures show patients are still 45 per cent more likely to die in an English NHS hospital than in America.

England performs particularly poorly in relation to conditions which can account for large numbers of patient deaths and affect the elderly – in 2010, a patient was five times as likely to die of pneumonia and twice as likely to die of septicaemia as a similar patient in the US.

Prof Jarman said he found the figures “shocking”, adding: “When I saw this data, it was probably the stimulus for me to speak more openly about my concerns about the NHS. It’s not to say that we don’t have some very good hospitals, but I think we also have some very poor hospitals.

“I hope there will be a complete opening up to allow whistle-blowers to say freely the problems that they see, to allow clinicians and patients to be involved in the running of hospitals, to listen to patients.

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“If you go to the States, doctors can talk about problems, nurses can raise problems, they listen to patient complaints. We have a system whereby, at the moment, for written hospital complaints only one in 375 is actually formally investigated. This is absolutely appalling.”

The medical director of the NHS, Sir Bruce Keogh, said he would look at the figures to see whether they could be used to improve performance. “I want our NHS to be based on evidence,” he said. “I don’t want to disregard stuff that might be inconvenient or embarrassing.

“The HSMR exposed things in Mid Staffordshire and people spent a lot of time arguing about the methodology, about the data. In the meantime bad things were happening.”

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