HALTON and Warrington Hospital’s annual quality report has revealed a higher than expected mortality rate for the past two years.

The hospital’s quality report for 2015/16 has revealed that the number of people who died in the trust’s care or within 30 days of discharge, was higher than expected between January 2014 and September 2015.

Concerns have also been raised to the Care Quality Commission around the hospital’s spinal surgery, but the report improvements in pressure ulcers, falls in the hospital and dementia care.

Director of nursing Karen Dawber explained that during 2015 as a whole the mortality rate had been as expected.

She said: “We look at the number of deaths on a monthly basis which usually goes across a seasonal pattern with more deaths in January and February than other months.

“We then look at-risk adjusted mortality to be used as an alarm clock – they’re not an absolute measure of quality but it says we should go and look at this area.

“We know as a hospital that our rate of the latter has been higher than expected for the last couple of years.

“What we’ve found over the last year though is that it has reduced to within the expected range and in 2015/16 we had less deaths than the year before.

“As an organisation we’ve done a lot of work over the last 18 months to look at care pathways, we’ve been to other organisations like Aintree, which had issues a couple of years ago, and brought in peer reviews of all deaths in the hospital.

“There are 80 to 100 deaths a month in the hospital – all of those deaths are reviewed and we aim to get all of those deaths then peer reviewed to see if we could have done anything differently.”

The report also revealed that during 2015/16, a whistleblower’s concerns sparked a review of spinal services, which Ms Dawber says has been resolved.

Patients will now meet with consultants from the specialist neurotherapy Walton Centre in Liverpool as well as Warrington Hospital surgeons ahead of any spinal surgery.

Ms Dawber added: “We do an element of spinal surgery that other district general hospitals don’t do because we have individuals that are qualified to do the surgery – our outcomes for spinal surgery are very good.

“We had a whistleblower to the CQC raising concerns about spinal surgery and a number of points were raised which we addressed – there were no major concerns left outstanding as a result of it.”

Ms Dawber also highlighted good news in the form of a reduction in pressure ulcer after a scheme to use red stripes on plaster casts to alert nurses to them was brought in, a below average rate of falls and the hospital’s dementia care.

She said the trust was now a ‘market leader’ in the field thanks to the specialist Forget Me Not unit.

She added: “We’re proud of an awful lot – in many metrics we’re one of the best in the north west or the country, which people don’t often think about little old Warrington.

“Some of the stuff around quality improvement has been really good – we’ve put the red stripe plaster cast forward for a national award because it was a good piece of improvement.

“The other area we’ve done well in is patient falls – patients unfortunately do fall in hospital but we are below the national average and have come down year on year.

“There are things we want to do better on and we’ve set those as our priorities going forward.

“To me the big push going forward is around the patient experience – complaints have dropped over the last year and feedback is generally getting better.

“Halton Hospital has excellent feedback all the time but Warrington Hospital is not quite as good and we need to really focus on that and deal with high-risk complaints as they come in.”