Jeremy Hunt: lies, damned lies & 6,000 statistics

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Mutterings from the Left

As the Junior Doctor’s contract dispute continues with no end in sight, I revisit the saga of certain claims made by the Health Secretary last year – and find, as always, nothing is quite as it seems.

There have been numerous debates surrounding the now-infamous Jeremy Hunt speech in July last year, when he claimed that 6,000 additional deaths were attributable to NHS staffing levels at the weekends and that mortality increased 15% on a Sunday compared to a Wednesday – statistics which he used in the context of arguing for a change in the Junior Doctor’s contract, to enable a “7-day NHS”.

It has always been speculated that the statistics he used must have been taken from an article (authored by Sir Bruce Keogh, Nick Freemantle, Domenico Pagano and several others) for the British Medical Journal into the association between the day of hospital admission and mortality, prior to…

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