Published 18 July 2008, doi:10.1136/bmj.a890
Cite this as: BMJ 2008;337:a890

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Mortality rates are a blunt tool, says health minister

¹ Margate

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The health minister Ara Darzi has admitted that mortality rates are a "blunt tool" to measure the quality of medical care in the NHS in England.

Lord Darzi was giving evidence to MPs on the parliamentary health select committee on Thursday 17 July as part of its inquiry into the government’s next stage review, published last month.

He said that alternative measures were needed to rate the safety, effectiveness, and patients’ experience of health care because death rates were "irrelevant" for many procedures in modern medicine.

Although the government recently published survival data for surgery patients for the first time and suggested that using such data could help in different areas (BMJ 2008;337:a803, 4 Jul doi: 10.1136/bmj.a803), Lord Darzi took a different approach.

"That is the data that is available today," he said. "I personally believe that it’s probably one of the crudest, bluntest instruments we can use. . . . [Full text of this article]

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