Rise in death rate linked to longer hospital stays

A new research paper has argued that increasing numbers of people being forced to stay in hospital for longer is part of the reason for the rise in mortality rates.

The Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health paper studies the death rates and the performance of the NHS and social care systems between July 2014 and June 2015 – the biggest year-on-year rise in mortality for 50 years. It found that 39,074 more deaths than usual occurred during that period, with the majority involving elderly people.

The doctors behind the study believe that approximately 7,800 of the above deaths may have been directly attributable to patients being stuck in hospital, whereby they were more vulnerable to hospital-acquired infections and less active, thereby increasing frailty.

The academics also argue that inadequate social care and austerity-linked pressures on the NHS have contributed to the mortality rise.

The paper says: “We demonstrate a positive association between the number of acute patients delayed in being discharged, and the cumulative amount of time acute patients were delayed, to the monthly number of deaths and mortality rate. Our results present evidence that a lower quality of performance of the NHS and adult social care as a result of austerity may be having an adverse impact on population health [and] may help explain part of the increases in mortality rates experienced in England from at least 2015 and onwards.”