To help reduce deaths from causes considered amenable to health care.
Causes of death are included if there is evidence that they are amenable to healthcare interventions and – given timely, appropriate, and high quality care – death rates should be low among the age groups specified. Healthcare intervention includes preventing disease onset as well as treating disease.
Two additional indicators are provided: ‘Mortality from causes considered amenable to health care (exc. ischaemic heart disease)’ and ‘Mortality from causes other than those considered amenable to health care’. The difference between amenable and non-amenable causes in their trends over time may provide evidence of the increasing (or decreasing) effectiveness of health care.
For information on the definitions of what these indicators include, please see the relevant specification.
From 2016 onwards, mortality counts within the Compendium Mortality Indicator set are based on a bespoke extract taken from the Primary Care Mortality Database (PCMD) maintained by NHS Digital. PCMD is updated monthly using a file of death records from ONS and is continually subject to amendment.
It is already well established that late registrations have a small impact on counts. This bespoke extract may be taken at a different time to that of the mortality data published by ONS and as such this may cause some small differences between ONS and NHS Digital mortality figures for a given year.