National Audit of Hospital Mortality Annual Report 2019

This report shows that there has been a continuing decrease in crude mortality trends for AMI, haemorrhagic stroke, pneumonia and heart failure over the past 10 years. However, ischaemic stroke and COPD have seen an increase in mortality rates in 2019 compared with 2018.

Hospitals and Hospital Groups continue to engage with NOCA around statistical outliers, and we thank them for their time and commitment to sharing their learnings in this report.

The global COVID-19 pandemic has impacted on this fifth National Audit of Hospital Mortality Annual Report. Although data for 2019 continued to be collated and coded in the local HIPE offices, closure of the HIPE national file for 2019 was delayed by 1 month. The bigger impact, however, was on work which was planned to be carried out during the first half of 2020. As the virus continues to impact our society and businesses, NAHM is planning to release data to the NQAIS NAHM web-based tool in late 2020 with the inclusion of a flag to identify COVID-19 cases. The data for the National Audit of Hospital Mortality Annual Report 2020 will be more significantly impacted, and NAHM will continue to make efforts to ensure that meaningful data are produced in the NQAIS NAHM tool for 2020.

NAHM has worked with stakeholders throughout the year, taking on board responses to issues as they arose. Work is planned for 2021 to analyse those hospitals which have been excluded from this public report due to the inclusion criteria for diagnoses. NAHM wishes to acknowledge the challenges faced by all contributors in writing this report; it could not have been written without the efforts of all staff in hospitals and HIPE offices nationwide. Thanks in particular go to members of the NAHM Report Writing Group, who have given up their time and shared their knowledge in the writing of this report.