Hospital admission data only capture deaths occurring before discharge, which we found to be 86% of the deaths occurring within 28 days. Studies without such linkage will have missed a proportion of these deaths because postdischarge deaths will have been difficult to capture. Furthermore, any change in this capture over time may have biased Akt inhibitor results. The linkage used in the current study, depending
as it does on probability matching, still leaves potential for some underestimation of mortality, but the robustness of the linkage coupled with its uniform methodology throughout the study period mean that bias because of this is unlikely to have occurred. The reduction in length of stay over the course of the study further emphasises the importance of identifying deaths following discharge to accurately calculate selleck products trends in mortality. The slight increase in postdischarge mortality might imply that the observed earlier discharge of patients was inappropriate; however, if management in hospital was no longer of benefit to a patient who is dying, then discharge might well be the most appropriate decision. The observed trends might therefore
indicate a shift of unavoidable in-hospital mortality into the postdischarge period. Patients who died in the emergency department before admission for endoscopy were not
included in our study because hospital admissions data contain information only on admitted patients. However, because acute admission to the hospital for all upper gastrointestinal hemorrhages was standard practice within England, the admissions data will have captured almost all other relevant for bleed presentations. We excluded patients who had a nonspecific code for gastrointestinal hemorrhage with a colonoscopy but no gastroscopy, and it is possible that these could have had an upper gastrointestinal bleed if they had died before a planned gastroscopy. However, this would be unlikely because usual practice would be to perform a gastroscopy before colonoscopy because of the easier access and greater therapeutic potential of gastroscopy. There have been concerns about the accuracy of routine hospital admissions coding, in particular the coding of specific operations and the ascertainment of death for generating mortality rates for specific hospitals. However, a systematic review found a 91% median accuracy in diagnostic coding prior to our study period, and the most recent audit of selected samples of UK hospital data confirmed accuracy approaching 90%.