Benchmarking outcome in ICU

There are as yet few well developed systems for comparing the quality of care in Irish hospitals with other hospitals either nationally or internationally. The best known are the perinatal mortality rates of the Dublin maternity hospitals. Other examples include mortality rates after cardiac surgery and survival rates after cancer surgery. We describe a comparison of outcomes in an Irish ICU with internationally validated mortality rates for a given severity of illness. The method of stratifying for severity of illness is by use of the APACHE II scoring system. In 2003 the standardised mortality ratio for Beaumont Hospital ICU was 0.87 with a mean APACHE II admission score of 17.5 which compares favourably with similar data produced from UK units.