NHS hospital deaths
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 27 September 2013
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Tim Harford examines the claim that NHS hospital patients are 45% more likely to die than US ones. Is Sir David Attenborough right that the world's population is increasingly out of control? And are 20% of the world's redheads in Scotland? Plus, the story of the Hawthorne Experiment, one of the most famous studies in industrial history.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thank you for downloading more or less from the BBC. This is the version of the |
| 0:04.1 | programme first broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Here's Tim Halford. |
| 0:09.1 | Hello and welcome to more or less, the programme about the numbers which surround us in the news |
| 0:14.4 | and in life. This week, fact checking none other than Sir David Attenborough. Yes, no one is safe |
| 0:23.0 | from the firm thwack of our slide rule. This fella has been feeling it too. |
| 0:28.3 | I am very sorry. I'm very sorry. And we tell the story of the most famous and most misunderstood |
| 0:35.6 | experiment in industrial history. But first, maybe you heard this recent channel for news story. |
| 0:43.0 | Shocking new figures given to this programme reveal that the NHS is fundamentally failing. They |
| 0:48.3 | suggest that death rates in hospitals in England have been far higher than in other countries. |
| 0:54.0 | And it's not just in the scandal hit trust you read about in the newspapers. But we're talking |
| 0:58.4 | here about the average NHS hospital. The figures compare by the eminent doctor and statistician |
| 1:04.3 | Professor Sir Brian Jarmann suggest patients are 45% more likely to die in hospital here than in |
| 1:10.8 | America. A loyal listener, Liz Lloyd, is one of several people who've been emailing us at |
| 1:16.5 | more or less at bbc.co.uk to say this sounds scary. Can you unpack the statistics on this? |
| 1:24.4 | It does sound scary Liz. So what's going on? The basis of this comparison is the HSMR |
| 1:31.7 | hospital standardised mortality ratio. We've looked at it before in this very series no less. |
| 1:37.7 | The HSMR measures how likely you are to die in a particular hospital relative to the typical hospital |
| 1:44.8 | after adjusting to the best extent possible for just what was wrong with you in the first place. |
| 1:50.2 | Channel 4 have asked instead how likely you were to die in one country's hospitals |
| 1:54.7 | between 2004 and 2010 relative to another country's again adjusting for how sick you are. |
| 2:02.2 | As you heard Kathy Newman saying on Channel 4 the research behind this story was conducted by |
| 2:07.2 | Professor Sir Brian Jarmann of Imperial College and with a title like that you probably don't |
... |
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