Today, Dr Christoph Lees and Dr Mark Slack of the Doctors’ Policy Research Group (DPRG) have written a comment piece about Professor Brian Jarman’s revelations last week about high mortality in NHS hospitals, according to his Hospital Standardised Mortality Ratio (HSMR). Their piece notes that Jarman’s statistics, which I also commented on yesterday for the Civitas Health Unit blog, showed that hospital mortality may have been 45% higher in the NHS than in US hospitals in 2012.
Slack and Lees criticise unevidenced measures taken by NHS managers, such as watering down dress codes and contracting out cleaning services, which were motivated by cost constraints and eroded professionalism and clinical standards in the NHS. They also praise the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix, Arizona, which was investigated in the Channel 4 programme that featured Jarman’s revelations, as an example of a hospital where “the ethos is one of putting the patient first” and where there is “an open culture where whistle blowing is encouraged” – this perhaps represents an example for the NHS to follow.
The full piece is available here. For more information about the Doctors’ Policy Research Group visit their webpage here.
