Professor Nick Black
speaker
14 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2013
last heard Aug 2013
Professor Nick Black’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I'd like to see them scrapped.
As HL Mencken said many years ago, that for every complex problem there is a simple solution and it's wrong.
And this is a classic example of that.
If I was Secretary of State for Health, I would love the idea that there was a single number that would tell me how my 160 trusts were doing.
It's not that simple.
Hospitals are incredibly complex organisations.
Clearly, deaths in hospital are important.
The challenge is to come up with an appropriate way statistically of looking at that.
And the approach that is now being adopted by NHS England and adopted by the government is to look at avoidable deaths.
And what I mean by that is that in each and every hospital, all the deaths should be looked at by the medical and nursing staff to establish whether or not
the patient died from an avoidable problem.
Now, we've done that with 10 trusts, and what we found was that about 5%, one in 20 deaths, are avoidable.
Our estimate for England, based on the 1,000 deaths that we looked at, would suggest there's about 12,000 avoidable deaths in adults in acute hospitals in England each year.
So what's being advocated and will be put in place from next April is that all trusts will be expected to review probably 100, 120 deaths in their trust in great detail to establish whether or not the patient died as a result of avoidable causes.
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