Information for clinical governance: analysis of routine hospital activity data in Wales

Variations in hospital admission rates have been extensively reported for many years, but this evidence has not had a wide impact on clinical practice. Understanding local reasons for high variation to improve quality of healthcare should be a focus of clinical governance. Our aim was to convert routine hospital activity data into information on a category of high-variation, discretionary, hospital admissions and provide a tool for analysis for clinical governors in Local Health Groups (LHG).