This is an indicator designed to accompany the Summary Hospital-level Mortality Indicator (SHMI).
As of the July 2020 publication, COVID-19 activity has been excluded from the SHMI. The SHMI is not designed for this type of pandemic activity and the statistical modelling used to calculate the SHMI may not be as robust if such activity were included. This indicator shows the number of provider spells which are coded as COVID-19, and therefore excluded from the SHMI, as a percentage of all provider spells in the SHMI (prior to the exclusion).
This new indicator is being published as an experimental statistic. Experimental statistics are official statistics which are published in order to involve users and stakeholders in their development and as a means to build in quality at an early stage.
Notes:
1. Please note that there has been a fall in the number of spells for most trusts between this publication and the previous SHMI publication, ranging from 1 per cent to 5 per cent. This is due to COVID-19 impacting on activity from March 2020 onwards and appears to be an accurate reflection of hospital activity rather than a case of missing data.
2. Day cases and regular day attenders are excluded from the SHMI. However, some day cases for University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (trust code RRV) have been incorrectly classified as ordinary admissions meaning that they have been included in the SHMI. Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust (trust code RWF) has submitted a number of records with a patient classification of ‘day case’ or ‘regular day attender’ and an intended management value of ‘patient to stay in hospital for at least one night’. This mismatch has resulted in the patient classification being updated to ‘ordinary admission’ by the HES data cleaning rules. This may have resulted in the number of ordinary admissions being overstated. The trust has been contacted to clarify what the correct patient classification is for these records. Values for these trusts should therefore be interpreted with caution.
3. On 1 October 2020 Poole Hospital NHS Foundation Trust (trust code RD3) merged with The Royal Bournemouth and Christchurch Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (trust code RDZ). The new trust is called University Hospitals Dorset NHS Foundation Trust (trust code R0D). However, as we received notification of this change after data processing for this publication began, separate indicator values have been produced for this publication. The next publication in this series will reflect the updated organisation structure.
4. Further information on data quality can be found in the SHMI background quality report, which can be downloaded from the 'Resources' section of the publication page.
5. The visualisation below is in Microsoft PowerBI which does not fully support all accessibility needs. If you need further assistance, please contact us for help.