NHS data on patients’ hospital treatments is not
accurate enough to be used in monitoring individual doctors’
performance, the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) has
warned.
A pilot scheme set up by the RCP allows doctors to check the
data collected and recorded for England’s Hospital Episode
Statistics and the Patient Episode Database for Wales. This covers
admissions to hospital, patients’ medical conditions, which
consultant patients are allocated to, and hospital discharge
dates.
The RCP’s director of health informatics, Prof John Williams,
said, “Data has been collected and used since the inception of the
NHS to monitor the performance of hospitals. It has never been
designed to monitor individual physicians and its unsuitability for
this purpose is confirmed by this study.
“For this purpose we need electronic record systems that capture
data at the point of care using common standards for the structure
and content of the record.”
The study identified a range of inaccuracies, including
treatments being ascribed to the wrong hospital consultants,
incorrect information about how long patients had spent in hospital
and gaps in the records.
It recommended that hospital episode statistics should not be
used for measuring the performance of individual doctors or to help
patients in their choices when seeking treatment.
The RCP warned that doctors were not sufficiently involved in
collecting, checking or using the data, which was input by
non-medical staff. The study found that data quality problems were
made worse because management datasets did not reflect the way
doctors actually provide care.