UK FAILS TO RECORD DEATH RATES

No Way of Detecting Poor Care

Coma is a cult movie written by the late Michael Crichton. It is also one of my favourite films. For a few years now, I have been hunting down the laws of the land that govern the death rate on wards. During the whistleblowing at Ward 87, I discovered there was a problem. That problem was a lack of recording of death rates. On the eve of Re validation and Re licencing, I wanted to discover what the real problem with the NHS is. We know it isn't the doctors because like all countries there are good doctors and bad doctors. We also know that Dame Janet Smith was completely wrong in her assessment of doctors. She missed out a very important issue within the system. She did not recommend that death rates on wards were compulsory. So this is what the Department of Health told me

DE00000364718

Dear Dr Pal,

Thank you for your further email of 6 November to the Department of Health about mortality rates. I have been asked to reply on this occasion. I can confirm that there is no regulation or law requiring individual hospital wards to calculate patient death rates. I hope this reply clarifies the Department’s position.

Yours sincerely,
James Butler
Customer Service Centre Department of Health

Is it only me that thinks the above admission is worrying?! So if there a hypothetical situation like COMA, no one would be able to detect it because it isn't compulsory to check the death rates. So if there is a next Dr Shipman as all professions have bad apples and psychopaths, there is no way of detecting high death rates because it isn't compulsory to record it.

Isn't this interesting!? So the UK health service quite happily goes through life without being held accountable. Essentially, there are pockets of mortality recording such as cardiac operations etc which was why Steve Bolsin managed to whistleblow adequately. For other specialities, there is simply no recording of death rate per ward.

So we have to go right back to the US media to find out the overall mortality rate in the UK. This is what a newspaper had to say

Discharging Patients For Life

Source Times Daily

"While those four countries averaged a 106.6 amenable mortality rate, Britain was almost 29 percent deadlier, with its rate of 135.3. The TPA thus calculates that the NHS took the lives of 17,157 Britons who otherwise would have survived were they treated by doctors across the English Channel. This figure is more than two-and-a-half times Britain's yearly alcohol-related deaths, and is quintuple its annual highway fatalities. Comparing 60 million Brits to 300 million Yanks, this is like a federally operated health agency eliminating 85,785 Americans in 2004."Anyone looking to reform the American health-care system should learn lessons from the European experience," says Matthew Sinclair, the TPA policy analyst who authored this study. "Britain's NHS has produced dismally poor results. Thousands die every year, thanks to its poor performance and its failure to make good use of new resources. Other European health-care systems deliver greater competition, decentralization and independence from political meddling."

Essentially, if there are no death rates recorded per ward, substandard care cannot be fully detected or improved. This is why Ward 87 and North Staffordshire NHS Trust practically got away with corporate manslaughter. Patients died but they themselves admit that they were not obliged to record death rate. Without a record of death rate, they were not obliged to improve healthcare.

Ward 87 is illustrative of just one ward. There are many other wards in the NHS.

In summary, the UK requires a law to make it compulsory to record death rates. This is actually the only way to detect the next Dr Shipman. The harassment of doctors within revalidation plus re licensing is a waste of time and ineffective in the absence of more monitoring in the NHS. None of the changes implemented by the GMC will ensure the next Dr Shipman is caught. The status quo and failure of the government to recognise their failings in monitoring death rate will mean that poor care is not detected or corrected.

There may be many reasons for poor care. Dr Shipman is simply one extreme. Nursing staff deficiencies, management failings etc will not be detected in the NHS. Perhaps this is convenient for the Labour Government - because if there are no statistics then there is no requirement to correct the system. Why correct the system when it requires more money?! This mode of behaviour reflects on the overall UK statistics as seen above. While healthcare is criticised in general, no one can specifically tell us where in the health care system, the problem lies. This is of course due to a failure to record statistics.