The information requested falls within the responsibility of the National Statistician, who has been asked to reply.
Letter from Colin Mowl, dated 24 July 2007:
The National Statistician has been asked to reply to your recent question asking how many deaths where the death certificate refers to healthcare-acquired infections there were in (a) hospital and (b) care homes in (i) Eastbourne and (ii) East Sussex in each of the last 10 years. I am replying in her absence. (151498)
Death certificates record the place where a person dies, but not where any infections may have been acquired. It is not possible from the information on a death certificate to know whether an infection was acquired in the hospital or other place where a patient died. Patients are often transferred between hospitals, nursing homes and other establishments and may have acquired infections in a different place from where they died.
ONS does not receive information on ‘healthcare-acquired infections’ but special analyses of deaths involving two infections that are often associated with healthcare, MRSA and Clostridium difficile, are undertaken annually by ONS for England and Wales. The most recent figures were published in reports in Health Statistics Quarterly 33 in February of this year. This publication is available in the House of Commons library.
The table below provides data on the number of death certificates of persons normally resident in East Sussex on which MRSA and Clostridium difficile were mentioned, from 1996 to 2005, the latest year for which figures are available. Breaking these figures down to local authority lever risks identifying individuals, and so figures can not be provided for Eastbourne.
Figures are reported in Health Statistics Quarterly for deaths involving MRSA and Clostridium difficile by place of death, including general hospitals and nursing homes. These figures show that in England and Wales around 90 per cent of these deaths occur in NHS general hospitals. Breaking down the number of deaths in East Sussex by place of death would risk identifying individuals. Figures by place of death can therefore not be provided for either East Sussex or Eastbourne.
(a) MRSA (b) Clostridium difficile 1996 6— 5n/a 1997 6— 5n/a 1998 9 5n/a 1999 10 23 2000 14 5n/a 2001 10 10 2002 15 17 2003 18 37 2004 14 19 2005 24 36 1 Identified using the methodology described in Griffiths C, Lamagni TL, Crowcroft NS, Duckworth G and Rooney C (2004). Trends in MRSA in England and Wales: analysis of morbidity and mortality data for 1993-2002. Health Statistics Quarterly 21, 15-22. 2 Identified using the methodology described in Office for National Statistics: Report: Deaths involving Clostridium difficile: England and Wales, 2001-2005. Health Statistics Quarterly 33, 71-75. 3 Figures are provided for usual residents of the current county of East Sussex. Deaths of residents of Brighton and Hove unitary authority are therefore excluded. 4 Data are for deaths occurring in each calendar year 5 Deaths involving Clostridium difficile can only be identified using the Tenth Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10). This has been used by ONS for coding mortality from 2001 onwards and in 1999 for a bridge coding study. Data are therefore not available for 1996-1998 and 2000 when the Ninth Revision of the ICD was in use. 6 Where less than five deaths, numbers have been suppressed in line with ONS guidelines on disclosure and confidentiality.