When a hospital is slow to act, it leaves a record.

What IDRS is

IDRS stands for Institutional Delay and Risk Scoring. It is a way of measuring one specific thing: when a hospital or health service was warned that something was wrong, what did it do about it, and how long did it take.

Coroners and the Health Ombudsman already write this down. They do it one case at a time, and each report is published on its own. IDRS reads across all of them and counts, so the same failure appearing at the same place three years apart is something you can see rather than something you would have to already suspect.

It produces a score for each report. The score is not an opinion about the hospital. It is an arithmetic summary of what the report itself records, and every part of it can be taken apart and checked.

The gap it is trying to close

A coronial finding is thorough, public, and read almost entirely on its own. Nobody is routinely counting across them. So when an institution has the same breakdown twice, or a recommendation is made and quietly not implemented, the pattern exists in the public record and no one is holding it.

That is the whole problem IDRS addresses. Not finding new information — counting information that is already public and already paid for by a death.

Who this is for

Being straight about what exists today and what does not:

Anyone who wants to know what the public record says

This page, and the reports it points to. All of it is free and none of it requires us — the coronial findings are public and you can read them directly.

Families who have lost someone

You may find it useful to see that a failure was not unique to your situation. IDRS cannot help with an individual case and is not a complaints service. The organisations that can help are listed below.

Lawyers, insurers and health services

A searchable version is in development for professional use, so a practitioner can find the relevant findings and the passages in them quickly. It is not open yet. The main site has details.

Researchers and journalists

The method was registered publicly before the analysis was run, and the scoring is documented well enough to be reproduced or disputed. We would rather be checked than believed.

What came up most often

These are the failures that appeared most often across the reports. Each one is counted only where the report itself records that it happened.

How a score is built

Each report is given a score built from six parts. Every part is recorded for every report, so the whole calculation can be taken apart and checked by someone else. That is the point of it.

Scores are also adjusted for how often an institution appears in the public record, so that a large hospital appearing more often is not penalised simply for its size.

What we left out, and why

A count is only meaningful if you know what is missing from it.

• Deaths that were never investigated by a coroner. Most deaths are not. Nothing here can tell you about those.
• Findings where the coroner chose not to name the institution. We do not try to work out which hospital was meant. Where a court withheld a name, we leave it withheld.
• Reports our own checks flagged as unreliable. Where an extraction could not be confirmed against the document, the report is held back rather than published with a doubtful figure.
• Harm that never reached a report at all. This is the largest gap and we cannot size it.

For the same reason, a hospital not appearing here is not evidence that it is safe. It may simply mean no death there has been through a published coronial inquest.

Check it yourself

Every score traces to a document published by the Coroners Court of Queensland or the Office of the Health Ombudsman. Those are public records and you do not need us to read them.

Our method was registered publicly before the analysis was run, so it can be checked against what we said we would do:

Pre-registration on the Open Science Framework  ·  Coroners Court of Queensland

Ask us a question

What this is, and what it is not

An IDRS score measures how an institution responded to warning signs that a published report records. It is not a measure of clinical quality, of how safe a hospital is overall, or of the care any individual person received. It does not tell you whether an institution is safe today.

IDRS is a research instrument. It is not legal, medical or financial advice, and it is not a substitute for professional advice or for reading the underlying report. Where a score and a document disagree, the document is the authority.

No individual practitioner is named or scored. Only publicly available court and ombudsman documents are used. No patient records, My Health Record data or private health information is accessed or held.

Findings are reported one case at a time rather than as a league table of hospitals, because the number of reports per institution is too small to support comparisons between them.

If this is personal for you

Some people reading this will have lost someone in the circumstances these reports describe. If that is you, these are the organisations set up to help. They are independent of IDRS and we have no involvement in what you tell them.