FEWER people are now dying in Worcestershire hospitals after concerns last year about higher than expected deaths.

The mortality rate at county hospitals including Worcestershire Royal Hospital in Worcester is now within what NHS bosses call the “normal range”, which means the risk of people dying has fallen.

Alarm bells started to ring in October last year when figures were published by the Department of Health suggesting there were 239 more deaths than expected across the trust in 2010/11. The trust’s own hospital mortality figures also suggested 200 more deaths than expected in the same year.

The way mortality is calculated is complicated and not always an exact science but Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust has used the HSMR also called ‘the Dr Foster system’ (after a commercial organisation run from Imperial College, London) and the summary hospital mortality index (SHMI).

The HSMR compares the expected rate of death in a hospital with the actual rate of death. Dr Foster data looks at those patients with diagnoses that most commonly result in death – for example, heart attacks, strokes or broken hips.

For each group of patients it is possible to work out how many, on average, across the whole country, survive their stay in hospital, and how many die.

Dr Foster does this by taking into account their age, the severity of their illness and other factors, such as whether they live in a more or less deprived area.

Dr Foster then compares this with the number of patients that actually die. If the two numbers are the same, the hospital gets a score of 100. If the number of dead is ten per cent less than expected they get a score of 90. If it is ten per cent higher than expected, they score 110.

In Worcester the score for the last financial year (April to December – the latest published figure) was 102, within the normal range which is 90-110 and 2 per cent higher than the numbers expected to die.

The figures also suggest that Worcestershire hospitals are safer than they were a year ago when the trust got a score of 110, at the upper end of the ‘normal range’.

Dr Steve Graystone, medical director for patient safety at Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, said: “The relative risk of mortality is falling at a rate faster than the rest of the country. This means that the actual number of people dying in our hospitals compared to the number of people who are expected to die has been falling over the course of 2011/12.”

Dr Graystone said trust has been advised not to publish the estimated numbers of deaths and use the HSMR score instead. He said after the meeting that the estimated number of deaths were a calculation rather than an actual number of people who had died above what was expected.

He added: “We were advised by patient safety experts at the Department of Health that it caused confusion and unnecessary distress.”