Northampton General Hospital NHS Trust Quality Account 2016-2017

Following on from this the Secretary of state for Health delivered a parliamentary statement
announcing his intentions that all NHS Trusts should collect and publish data on all deaths
occurring in hospital including an estimate of the number of deaths assessed as more than likely to
have been due to problems in care (i.e. “avoidable” deaths), an assessment of potential causes of
any variation from the national average, and evidence of learning and the actions taken.
In March 2017 the National Quality Board published the document “National Guidance on Learning
from deaths – a framework for NHS Trusts and Foundation Trusts on Identifying, investigating and
Learning from deaths in care”.
In response to this the Trust has developed a policy for “Reviewing, investigating and learning from
mortality”. This policy describes how we learn and share this from reviewing the care of all patients
who have died, and how we will engage with bereaved families and carers.
The majority of deaths are considered to be expected and unavoidable. It is recognised from
available evidence that approximately 4% of deaths in hospital have an element of avoidability. We
have developed a process to enable us to identify patients whose death may have been avoidable
which will allow for an in-depth review of the case.
The outcome of these reviews will be provided to the Quality Governance Committee and the Trust
Board by the Medical Director.
Data Quality
NHS Number and General Medical Practice Code Validity
The Trust submitted records between April 2015 and January 2016 to the Secondary Users
Service for inclusion in the national Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) database which are included
in the latest published data outlined below and compared to the previous year’s results.
Period – April16 – Dec 16 Valid NHS Number Valid GMPC
Inpatients 99.6% 100%
Outpatients 99.8% 99.9%
A&E 98.2% 99.5%
Period - Apr15 to Jan16 Valid NHS Number Valid GMPC
Inpatients 99.6% 100%
Outpatients 99.9% 99.9%
A&E 98.1% 98.8%
Comparison Valid NHS Number Valid GMPC
Inpatients 0.0% 0.0%
Outpatients -0.1% -0.0%
A&E +0.1% -0.7%
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