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Jan Poloniecki, St. George's Medical School, and Patrick Sturgis, University of Southampton
(Project no. 30141)
Deaths rates will be calculated for comparison with contemporary death rates following discharge from English NHS acute Trusts as derived from Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) data. Data aggregated by integral age and gender are sought. The data are cell counts of the number of "exposed" people, i.e. observed for survival, and the number of deaths. These will enable an actuarial life table to be constructed. The data handling and calculation done in this way can be mirrored with HES data. Hence a good characterisation of the survival of disease groups following hospital treatement can be reported.
We have compared survival post-discharge in HES data with English Life Table 16 (ELT16) and obtained preliminary results. The manner in which ELT16 is generated, particularly regarding the role of denominators, makes ELT16 not directly comparable with HES data.
The structure of LS data, however, is similar to HES. Members join the LS, while patients enter our sample of observed subjects by being discharged from hospital. The number and identity of members under study and patients exposed post discharge is known continuously over many years, subject to fairly undemanding assumptions and approximations about loss to followup e.g. by embarcation or emmigration. During follow up dates of death of members and patients are known. A major strength equally of both data sets is that calculations can be based solely on observations in specified calendar years. We propose a 3 year window of observation. By varying the specified years trends in survival can be quantified.