A government advisor has accused ministers and NHS officials of ignoring high mortality rates for more than a decade.
Professor Sir Brian Jarman, director of the Doctor Foster research unit at Imperial College in London, said more than 20,000 hospital deaths could have been avoided if warnings over high death rates had been acted upon.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme, Sir Jarman described how he devised a system for monitoring death rates, known as hospital standardised mortality ratios (HSMRs). He has been using this measure to publish figures on hospital death rates for the more than 12 years.
The data he collated exposed high mortality rates across a number of hospitals – something he tried to bring to the attention of senior NHS officials. But Sir Jarman says his warnings were ignored.
He said: “For the last 10 years there were about four [hospitals] who have had continuously very high adjusted death rates. And actually I sent to the Secretary of State in March 2010, Andy Burnham, a list of hospitals that had high [rates].” The findings were sent on to the Care Quality Commission (CQC), who reported “they did not find that there was anything to worry them.”
The hospitals which Sir Jarman identified as having high mortality rates are now under investigation, prompted only by the terrible scandal at Mid-Staffordshire Trust. He says they should have been listed for investigation earlier, which would have helped limit the number of preventable deaths.
“I think there must be at least tens of thousands of avoidable deaths in those hospitals alone, when we should have been going in and we should have been looking at them”, he said. “It would have been easy to improve things.”
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