Summary Hospital-level Mortality Indicator (SHMI) - Deaths associated with hospitalisation, England, December 2019 - November 2020
Indicator reporting mortality at hospital trust level across the NHS. This indicator is produced on a monthly basis and gives an indication for each non-specialist acute hospital trust in England whether the observed number of deaths within 30 days of discharge from hospital was higher than expected, lower than expected or as expected when compared to the national baseline.
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The SHMI is the ratio between the actual number of patients who die following hospitalisation at the trust and the number that would be expected to die on the basis of average England figures, given the characteristics of the patients treated there. It covers patients admitted to hospitals in England who died either while in hospital or within 30 days of being discharged.
To help users of the data understand the SHMI, trusts have been categorised into bandings indicating whether a trust’s SHMI is ‘higher than expected’, ‘as expected’ or ‘lower than expected’. For any given number of expected deaths, a range of observed deaths is considered to be ‘as expected’. If the observed number of deaths falls outside of this range, the trust in question is considered to have a higher or lower SHMI than expected.
The SHMI is not a measure of quality of care. A higher than expected number of deaths should not immediately be interpreted as indicating poor performance and instead should be viewed as a ‘smoke alarm’ which requires further investigation. Similarly, an ‘as expected’ or ‘lower than expected’ SHMI should not immediately be interpreted as indicating satisfactory or good performance.
Trusts may be located at multiple sites and may be responsible for one or more hospitals. A breakdown of the data by site of treatment is also provided, as well as a breakdown of the data by diagnosis group.