DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH
News Release issued by The Government News Network on
The NHS has today
taken a significant step towards greater patient choice with the
publication of national operation survival rates.
The data for four common operations for each trust in England
comes from the Healthcare Commission's published cardiac
survival data.
The figures, which are published in a user-friendly format and as
raw data, reveal that all hospitals are performing within
acceptable guidelines and five hospitals are above average.
The figures are published alongside the Health Informatics Review
- a review of how information can be better used across the
Department and NHS.
The Health Informatics Review sets out a vision, supported by a
number of key proposals, that describe how coverage and quality of
information can be enhanced to meet these needs and help transform
health and social care and will be followed by a more detailed,
technically based Health Informatics Review Implementation Report
in the autumn 2008.
Publication of the survival rates immediately puts into action
one of the report's key recommendations - to give patients a
greater say in the care they receive by extending choice on
treatment options. It also builds on the Department's
commitment, to enhance quality and choice, which was outlined in
the NHS Next Stage Review, published on 30June.
The data, which indicates the success of an operation, is
published on the NHS's website, NHS Choices, as part of the
'hospital scorecard', which allow patients to compare
hospital treatment options from a range of clinical and
non-clinical data such as length of stay and MRSA rates.
The NHS Choices website can be found at: http://www.nhs.uk
NHS Medical Director and interim Director General for Informatics
Sir Bruce Keogh said:
"Whilst we are rightly proud of our NHS which offers good,
evidence based and innovative clinical services there is a view
that we have lagged behind other industries in providing
sophisticated IT infrastructure to support NHS staff to deliver a
21st century service which enables to patients engage more fully
in their care.
There is a strong appetite in the NHS to develop a coherent
informatics infrastructure to address the issues of data transfer
and security between multiple organisations using a myriad of
different systems in Europe's largest organisation, but this
is not going to be easy. To get it right will take time but good
information is fundamental to modern healthcare."
The first data to be published is for Abdominal Aortic Aneurysms
(elective and emergency), elective hip replacements and knee
replacements and will be followed in the coming months by a series
of clinical outcome data being made available for a wider range of
elective and emergency surgery.
Alongside the new data, NHS Choices will publish Health Guides to
help manage depression, dementia, diabetes and asthma. Each
contains useful information on prevention, diagnosis, treatment
and living with long-term conditions.
The Health Informatics Review takes forward the commitments
outlined in the NHS Next Stage Review to extend choice and realise
the potential of our technology capabilities to enhance healthcare.
The Health Informatics Review Implementation report will set out
how the measures identified in the review will be put into
practice. These include:
* Developing better systems of securely sharing information
across organisational boundaries;
* Developing a 'Myspace' type interface that allows
staff to access information about education and training, clinical
information and research, and career progression through a single site;
* Piloting systems such as clinical dashboards that allow
clinicians to monitor the performance of a service and quality of
care by combining many sources of clinical information from the
hospital and local health community in single display. It allows
health professionals to get a clear picture at a glance of a
several indicators of a patient's condition; and
* A renewed focus on reducing the time taken and the resources
needed to collect data while ensuring it is used to maximum benefit.
NHS Connecting for Health, which now incorporates NHS Choices, is
delivering these key elements of the Review, including the
development of clinical dashboards, which will improve the quality
of patient care.
Commenting on the outcome of the Health Informatics Review, chief
executive of The NHS Information Centre Tim Straughan said:
"We welcome the outcome of the Informatics Review which
firmly establishes The NHS Information Centre as the central,
authoritative source of health and social care information in
England. High-quality, relevant information is crucial to enable
the NHS to deliver world class services and to enable patients to
make decisions about their health and care. We are delighted the
review so clearly establishes our role in both providing and
encouraging the availability of such information across the service."
Notes to Editors
1. The Health Informatics Review was commissioned by the NHS
Chief Executive and Department of Health Permanent Secretary to:
* assess the supply of, and demand for, information across the
NHS and social care, so that the data collected can be used to
provide valuable and relevant information;
* make sure that, five years after the commissioning of the
National Programme for IT, the framework for the NHS Care Records
Service and the Secondary Uses Service (SUS) is in line with
recent, current and potential future policy;
* make sure that the governance of informatics within the NHS and
the Department of Health (DH) is clear and appropriate, and
supported by the right management.
A copy can be accessed at: http://www.ournhs.nhs.uk
2. In the NHS Choices survival data hospitals which performed
better than the expected range were as follows:
* For AAA (elective): Newcastle Upon Tyne Hospitals NHS
Foundation Trust, University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust,
Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust
* For AAA (emergency): Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital
NHS Trust
* For hip replacement (elective, planned): No hospitals in this category
* For knee replacement (elective, planned): East Kent Hospitals
NHS Trust
3. NHS Choices clinical indicators and guides to long-term
conditions can be found at: http://www.nhs.uk
The clinical indicators figures are published as bandings that
indicate whether they are within acceptable limits and
standardised mortality ratios (SMR) for each trust and procedure.
The standardised mortality ratios within a given band may vary
widely between trusts. This difference does not represent a
statistically significant variation in performance.
The difference in SMR numbers arise because of:
* the
relatively small numbers of deaths associated with the four procedures.
* small numbers of operations being performed by a trust
* the relative complexity of the cases.
Standardised mortality ratios are not an average. They are a
measure against expectations. The survival rate nationally, for
hip and knee operations is that 98% of patients will survive.
Therefore, it should not be surprising that for this procedure all
trusts fall within the expected range.
The measured performance of trusts within the same band is
effectively equivalent. It would therefore be inappropriate to
draw conclusions about the risks to survival at individual trusts
from a comparison of standardised mortality ratios.