How can never event data be used to reflect or improve hospital safety performance* ?
Olivarius-McAllister J., Pandit M., Sykes A., Pandit JJ.
The absolute number of never events is used by UK regulators to help assess hospital safety performance, without account of hospital workload. We applied funnel plots, as an established means of taking workload into account, to published never event data for 151 acute Trusts in NHS England, matched to finished consultant episodes for 3 years, 2017-2020. Trusts with excess event rates should have the most never events if absolute number is a valid way to judge performance. The absolute number of never events was correlated with workload (r2 = 0.51, p