The Summary Hospital-level Mortality Indicator (SHMI) is a score that reports on mortality rates at trust-level across the NHS in England, using a standard and transparent methodology.
Since 2011 it has been produced and published as an official statistic by NHS Digital. Historically it was published on a quarterly basis but since January 2019 it has been reported every month. It is usually published four months in arrears.
The SHMI is the ratio between the actual number of patients who die following hospitalisation at the trust and the number that would be expected to die on the basis of average England figures, given the characteristics of the patients treated there.
In essence, therefore, SHMI is trying to do the same things as HSMR – with different variable factors taken into account in calculating the scores. The key difference is that SHMI includes deaths following a patient’s discharge (within 30 days).
