At the moment our HSMR could be better.

Our clinical lead, Dr Alex Hamiliton, has led a review to look into our mortality rates to see how we can improve them but we need your help too, so here's some more information for colleagues.

We've committed to look into the care of every patient who dies when they are with us, but we currently manage to do this around 70 percent of the time.

So how do we look into deaths in our care?

One of our senior doctors or nurses reviews the care of the patients who have died to find out if there was anything we could have done differently in the last few days of that person's life. We look for themes or trends which highlight a focus of attention for our Trust. Sometimes we'll see a concern around a specific condition, pneumonia or sepsis for example. When this happens we look at this condition in more detail to see what we can do to make improvements or changes - with a real focus on learning.

We have a 'Care of the Acutely Ill Patient’ action plan and it is focussed around six themes. These are:

Reviews and learning

As we said earlier we should be looking into every death with the sole purpose of learning from any trends or themes.

Reliability

It's vital that patients get what they need, when they need it to improve outcomes. We're already working toward this by introducing care pathways/bundles, we now need to make sure that care is reliable for every single patient.

Recognition and response

It's important to recognise when patients deteriorate so our clinical teams can respond quickly. We've already introduced Nerve Centre electronic observations to support this. The next step is to make sure that we respond rapidly if a patient is deteriorating.

End of life care

Good quality end of life care is paramount. We know that some patients will die in our care naturally as part of their illness - we want to make sure their care is the best it can be for them at the end of their life.

Frailty

Many of our patients are elderly with multiple conditions so we'll pay particular attention to their needs.

Clinical coding

Accurate clinical records are vital. The work to introduce EPR in maternity has already improved clinical coding. It may be a small element but accurate clinical coding helps us know for sure if the data is really flagging a concern.