19,000 hospital deaths ‘ignored’

MORE than 19,000 ‘unexpected deaths’ in NHS hospitals over the past five years have been ignored because officials have ‘fudged’ the figures, an expert has claimed.

Professor Sir Brian Jarman said the systematic exclusion of the deaths by NHS chiefs means ‘potentially unsafe’ hospitals could be overlooked because high death rates are not showing up.

He calculated that there had been 32,810 deaths above the expected level in English hospitals over the past five years.

But using the NHS’s preferred method, only 13,627 were classed as such in official statistics – meaning 19,183 unexpected deaths were not logged.

Using Professor Jarman’s method, 34 NHS trusts would have been flagged as having significantly high death rates last year. The NHS method counted only ten trusts.

Professor Jarman, emeritus professor at Imperial College London, was ignored a decade ago when he raised concerns about deaths at the Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust, which became a scandal.

Yesterday he said: ‘Because the NHS is using what might be called a “fudge factor”, they are only identifying ten [hospital trusts]. As a result, we don’t know if anybody is taking any notice of these other 24 potentially unsafe hospital trusts.’

His method of calculating a hospital’s level of unexpected deaths was used by NHS chiefs until 2012. It flags up hospitals with a rate of unexpected deaths more than 6 or 7 per cent above the national average.

NHS Digital statisticians say the approach they have used since then is more suitable as it ‘better reflects’ the difficulties in comparing death rates among hospitals which serve very different areas.

This flags up hospitals with an unexpected deaths rate 12 per cent above the national average.