Mid Staffs: Disaster By Numbers (Or ‘How To Create A Drama Out Of A Statistic’)?

The campaign about poor care at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust culminated in a statutory public inquiry. There were both qualitative data about poor care and quantitative data about mortality rates. The campaign focussed initial press coverage on the excess mortality figures with reports talking about hundreds of “unnecessary deaths”. This paper looks at the basis for those figures and their role in judging the quality of healthcare, the admissibility of expert evidence on HSMR figures, and whether raised HSMR or SHMI adjusted mortality rates have any probative value in clinical negligence claims.