Madam, - I find myself obliged to write to you concerning figures published in relation to the Coombe Women's Hospital. An article published on Monday, December 8th, concerns the Annual Clinical Report, Year 2002, from Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda. The article quotes the corrected perinatal mortality rate for Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda as 5.04 per 1,000 births. Unfortunately, the author of the report then goes on to compare this figure with the maternity hospitals in Dublin. The figures quoted for the Rotunda and National Maternity Hospitals appear to be correct. However, the figure for the Coombe Women's Hospital is more than twice the actual figure. The corrected perinatal mortality rate for the Coombe Women's Hospital was 4.7 in 2001 and 4.0 in 2002, not 8.4 as reported.
While I believe that Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital deserved to be commended for producing an annual clinical report and congratulated on its results, comparisons between secondary and tertiary referral units can be misleading.
To date it has not been the norm to quote other hospitals' figures when producing an annual clinical report.
If this practice is going to change then one would hope and reasonably expect that the authors of a clinical report could at least quote the figures correctly. - Yours, etc.,
Dr SEAN DALY, Master, Coombe Women's Hospital, Dublin 8.