What are crude mortality rates?
A hospital’s crude mortality rate looks at the number of deaths that occur in a hospital in any given year and then compares that against the amount of people admitted for care in that hospital for the same time period. The crude mortality rate can then be set as the number of deaths for every 100 patients admitted.
What it tells you is how a hospital or Trust’s mortality rate changes over time. In the case of our hospitals, the Trust’s historical crude mortality rate is set out in the charts below.
| Total number of patients admitted | Total number of deaths | % per 100 admitted | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2010/11 | 95,071 | 1,912 | 2.0% |
| 2009/10 | 99,755 | 1,915 | 1.9% |
| 2008/09 | 91,327 | 2,069 | 2.0% |
| 2007/08 | 87,190 | 2,033 | 2.3% |
| 2006/07 | 84,833 | 2,015 | 2.3% |
This table shows that over the last five years, the Trust’s crude mortality rate has been falling as fewer patients die as an overall percentage of those we have treated. If anything, that improvement appears to have speeded up since 2007/08 – which is really welcome news.
This final table breaks down our crude mortality rates by our major clinical divisions – medicine, surgery and women’s and children’s services. What this shows is that the relative risk for surgery, despite the best efforts of Hollywood perhaps, is much lower than that for general medicine. While we have seen general reductions in the crude mortality rates for each of these three clinical divisions, the biggest improvement has been achieved by our medical teams.
| Medicine | Surgery | Women’s & Children’s | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2010/11 | 5.7 | 0.8 | 0.2% |
| 2009/10 | 5.8 | 0.7 | 0.1 |
| 2008/09 | 6.6 | 0.8 | 0.1 |
| 2007/08 | 87,190 | 2,033 | 2.3% |
| 200/07 | 7.4 | 0.9 | 0.2 |
What does all this information tell us?
Quite simply that during a period when the number of people being admitted to the Trust’s hospitals has been rising year-on-year, those dying have been falling – both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of those admitted. In essence, fewer people are dying in our hospitals year-on-year.
