Death rates in Warwick Hospital higher than the national average

DEATH rates in Warwick Hospital are higher than the national average in six categories, according to a damning new report.

Independent health watchdog Dr Foster has named South Warwickshire General Hospitals NHS Trust, which manages the hospital, as one of the worst performing in the country for patient safety.

Its report reveals there were more deaths than expected for patients who had suffered a stroke, a heart attack, a broken hip and for those who had been admitted for a low-risk operation like a tonsillectomy, compared to the national average.

Significantly, deaths from emergency admissions and the overall death rate are also above the national average for the trust, which also runs the outpatients part of Stratford Hospital.

For these latter two mortality rates, when 100 people were expected to die given the circumstances, there were actually 116 deaths.

The Dr Foster report says that because this figure is so much higher “chance is an unlikely explanation.”

It has placed the trust’s patient safety score 121st out of the 146 trusts in England – giving it a patient safety summary score of just 17.81 out of a possible 100.

But a spokesman for the trust said they are “frustrated” with the Dr Foster analysis, as the trust has been making progress with patient safety, according to a national campaign. And the hospital’s mortality levels have been falling over the last three years.

She said: “The trust has not received any mortality alerts during the year from quality regulators which are the formal channels to flag any concerns.”

But mortality alerts occur when the odds of dying following a diagnosis or procedure are doubled for a number of groups.

The trust has also questioned the way Dr Foster calculates its Hospital Standardised Mortality Ratio (HSMR), which is used as a benchmark for expected deaths.

The trust’s medical director Steve Mather said: “The Dr Foster HSMR calculation takes its data from that which each hospital provides to the Department of Health.

“That data may not be completely accurate which then calls into question the validity of the calculation.

“A further complicating matter is the secrecy surrounding the methodology used by Dr Foster which does not allow individual trusts to scrutinise their own results.”

But research director and co-founder of Dr Foster, Roger Taylor, said: “We make every effort to check with the hospital trusts the data they supply to us, and to accommodate changes where they have made a mistake.

“Dr Foster has been analysing and publishing mortality data for almost a decade and the methodology has been extensively peer reviewed in academic journals.

“HSMRs are published by the government on the NHS Choices website and used by many leading healthcare organisations around the world.”

But Mr Mather said: “The index does make the trust aware of a potential problem, which is why the hospital has established a mortality group to look at all deaths occurring within the hospital, examining the causes and making recommendations to individual departments.”

Other areas of Warwick Hospital showed good progress according to its own records. No patients have contracted MRSA while in hospital since April 2009, and in the same period there have been 33 cases of C. difficile when its target was 63 or less.

Paul Jennings, chief executive of NHS Warwickshire, said: “South Warwickshire is a good trust and patients can be confident of high quality NHS care when they go there.”