Healthcare inspectors are launching an official investigation this week into numbers of deaths at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust, which they suspect may be excessively high, particularly among patients admitted as emergencies.
The Healthcare Commission said that it was alerted last September to possible problems in the trust’s systems for monitoring mortality. Since then it had visited the trust twice and found that its death rates were higher than those in similar trusts in England.
However, the commission refused to say which time period was being investigated or to give the number of deaths until after the investigation.
Nigel Ellis, who heads the commission’s investigation unit, said, “An apparently high rate of mortality does not necessarily mean there are problems with safety. It may be that there are other factors here, such as the way that information about patients is recorded by the trust. Either way, it does require us to ask questions.”
Martin Yates, chief executive at the trust, said he believed that death rates at the trust were within the normal range for the population (300 000 people) served by its Cannock Chase Hospital and Stafford Hospital.
For 2005-6 the Dr Foster Hospital Guide put the trust’s standardised mortality rate (which is set at 100 nationally) at 127. But the trust said that an investigation it had carried out into the reasons for the “apparently” high figure concluded that it was because of problems in the way information about patients was recorded and coded.
After employing more clinical coding experts last year, the trust had seen an improvement in the quality of the recorded information, said Mr Yates. Between May and October 2007 the death rate for emergency admissions at the trust was 100.4 and for all admissions it was 101, he said.
The commission said it would also be looking at the quality of care at the trust, in particular that provided to elderly people, after patients raised a number of concerns. Governance arrangements to protect patients’ safety would also be investigated, it said.
The trust, which gained foundation status last month, was rated as “fair” on the quality of its services in the commission’s round of annual health checks last year.
Mr Ellis said, “The figures at Mid Staffordshire Foundation Trust are out of normal range, which is why we are carrying out this investigation to get a clear picture of what is going on.
“People using the trust’s hospital services should be assured, however, that if we thought the trust was unsafe we would have already taken action. There is no cause for immediate alarm. The safety of patients is our number one priority; nothing will get in the way of this.”
