Wanted - The Good Hospital Guide (12 September 2024)

Summary

In this Substack post, journalist Rory Cellan-Jones looks at a privately-funded project that aimed to give patients a better idea of how safe different hospitals were—the Good Hospital Guide. He speaks to Alex Kafetz, who worked on the Good Hospital Guide over a decade ago and was also a witness at the Mid Staffs inquiry in 2013. The project spotted and alerted Stafford Hospital to its high adjusted mortality rate ahead of the scandal, but the hospital rejected its data and findings. The Good Hospital Guide project was discontinued after its parent company was taken over, and nothing like it has been developed since, in spite of its success in identifying data patterns that indicated patient safety issues. Rory also highlights the lack of accessible data about hospital performance and mortality rates available to patients and highlights the need for making its data more accessible and transparent.