Hospital figures 'easy to affect'

Hospital managers can easily manipulate the system over death rates figures, claims one of the founders behind the body which calculates the statistics.

Roger Taylor is a co-founder of Dr Foster Int-elligence which publishes standardised hospital mortality rates. These death rates can help to show which hospitals could have problems with their standards of care.

But Mr Taylor told the Francis Inquiry into failures at Stafford Hospital, which today reached its 100th day, that the system of calculating death rates relied on the way hospitals recorded, or coded, their patient conditions.

He revealed that hospitals could "significantly" affect their mortality rates by changing some patient codes.

It emerged on Monday that both Stafford and Walsall hospitals had reduced their death rates by claiming hundreds of patients were terminally ill, meaning their deaths would be removed from the calculations.

But Mr Taylor said hospitals could also class the most serious problem for a patient as the main diagnosis, even if that was not the reason they were admitted.

This would mean their risk of dying was higher and this would lower the mortality rate of the hospital.

He said: "Clearly, at the extreme, the ability to do this would be fairly large, you could recode huge amounts of data and ultimately completely change your HSMR. For that particular trick, it would be very hard to spot it in the data."

Mr Taylor also told the inquiry that the suspected number of deaths at Stafford Hospital, of between 400 and 1,200, was a statistical estimate and only a study of patient notes could reveal the true toll.