Country Correspondents: Aisha Gomez and Molly Fitzgerald
England’s National Health Service (NHS) is set to be the first health care system in the world to publish estimates of “avoidable deaths,” or deaths attributed to the fact that patients did not receive available care. Each NHS Trust will be tasked with developing a methodology for counting avoidable deaths, with data to be published quarterly. This means that the numbers will not be comparable between regions. The new initiative aims to build greater trust between NHS trusts and patients, as well as allow trusts to learn from each other and share lessons learned across England. As of December 2017, 171 of the 223 NHS trusts in England have already released or are releasing their first estimates of avoidable deaths.
