A new Welsh approach to the publication of death rates in hospitals is needed, an expert group has recommended.
The Health Minister, Mark Drakeford, asked a team of senior clinicians, information specialists and patient representatives to examine whether the continued use of current mortality indicators covering Wales and England was clinically meaningful.
The team, led by Dr Chris Jones, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer, has concluded that risk adjusted hospital mortality rates (RAMI) cannot be used to compare the quality of care between different healthcare systems.
The Transparency Taskforce findings, published today, also call for more clinical data to be made easily available to patients in Wales at hospital and even specialty level.
The report recommends that mortality measures are treated with caution, and should always be published and considered alongside more direct measures of service quality, such as patient feedback and untoward incidents.
Caution about use of such figures was recently expressed by Professor Nick Black, an academic leading an official review into the use of mortality indicators commissioned by the Department of Health in England.
The Taskforce findings on mortality rates echo the Government Statistical Service’s conclusion that certain hospital mortality indicators are not comparable between countries.
Dr Chris Jones said: “The taskforce report recognises that the NHS in Wales has already taken significant steps to become more transparent, such as the introduction of the My Local Health Service website which offers clear and easy to understand data about the Welsh NHS.
“However, it is clear that some of the information currently available is too technical, and too hard to find and use.
“To be useful in identifying what is really happening, mortality figures need to be monitored and published at a number of levels within a single health service. No one way of measuring mortality gives a clear picture of the overall position within a hospital or the whole system.
“We therefore suggest that the Welsh Government works closely with health boards to implement a new system relating to Welsh hospitals only, to be implemented by this autumn.”
