‘This is the most egregious use of data I have seen in my entire clinical life’ – former WHSCT Consultant
The veracity of Western Trust claims regarding outcomes for patients in Derry’s Altnagelvin Hospital requiring emergency general surgery (EGS) is being challenged. There are also concerns about the level of over-inference or optimism it is attaching to outcome measures.
The data relate to the Trust’s ‘temporary’ suspension of ESG provision at Enniskillen’s South West Acute Hospital and centralisation to Altnagelvin. A former Trust Consultant described the claims as the “most egregious use of data I have seen in my entire clinical life”. “When we go to scientific meetings, whenever data is [sic] presented, there are always confidence intervals. When you see confidence intervals as wide as they are in the Trust’s data, you can have no confidence. You cannot draw any conclusions from the data,” they said.
“The Public Health Agency told the Trust not to use the data but it went ahead and used it. It is the wrong analysis. “It is all complete nonsense. The whole methodology is flawed,” said the former WHSCT Consultant. An independent clinical professional described it as a “poorly thought through use of metrics”. “The outcome (mortality) itself is poor and there is a lack of methodological clarity about how the patients were counted at a basic level. Small changes between admission groups from new pathways of care could have a big effect on these data,” they added.
“There are other measures much more valuable to measuring the quality of emergency surgical care at individual patient level. “It is easy to come up with these if you look at the most recent reports about pancreatitis, bowel obstruction and gastrointestinal bleeding, from the National Confidential Enquiry Into Patient Outcome and Death. Why isn’t there a bigger focus on taking processive care measures from these reports?
“It is disappointing there are highly paid professionals not doing adequate due diligence on using information. Especially when the initial consultation seemed to involve significant missteps.
“Processive care measures are the specific steps or activities carried out to deliver patient care. These are potentially more important than statistically uncertain indicators of mortality outcomes,” they said.
Commissioned by the Fermanagh-based Save Our Acute Services campaign, Paul Bassett published his ‘Statistical evaluation of data on the change in Emergency Surgery provision in Western Health and Social Care Trust’ in November 2025. Mr Bassett said: “It is hard to say with any certainty that things have gotten better or worse because the numbers are quite small. If there have been some changes, which they are claiming, there is no statistical justification that those differences are genuine ones and not just a chance variation over time.”
what an important story.
Data, when it informs the access to emergency trauma and emergency surgical care, must be strong, valid and must be safe.
Fermanagh patients cannot be treated with equal liklihood to survive in the current illogical pathways operated by the Western Trust management.
Neither SWAH – tthe hospital serving 83,343 people nor Altnagelvin can manage this on a pateitn safe basis,
We remain determined to be the uniquely disadvanted but also the driven underdog.
4.4% of the voices in this region will NOT be silenced when lives are at stake; our lives, our children and their children. We have the equal right to live. We will demand that.