Dutch hospital associations have reached agreement on publishing absolute death rates from 2010, with new figures calculated according to patient profile and risks by 2011.

Patient groups and politicians have called for death rates to made public for years.
‘Hospitals have had these figures for years,’ a spokesman for the national hospital association NVZ told the Volkskrant. ‘But making them public is difficult because people can draw the wrong conclusions from them.’
The 2011 calculations, known as HSMR, will place the actual number of deaths against what would be expected, given the age of the local population and other factors.