Professor Sir Brian Jarman, one of Sir Bruce's advisers and a mortality data expert, said that he warned health officials over the course of a decade about the high death rates but was ignored.
"I tried to forecast total deaths minus cremations," using census and mortality data, he says.
Several people who have seen the data said several surgeons are identified as "outliers" — those who have higher-than-expected mortality rates.
Researchers have long documented that the most educated Americans were making the biggest gains in life expectancy, but now they say mortality data show that life spans for some of the least educated Americans are actually contracting.
Former heart tsar Sir Roger Boyle, now the director of the National Institute of Clinical Outcomes Research, which oversees mortality data across the NHS, has said in the past that, after Oxford, the mortality rates for Leeds were the worst.
The CQC said: "The mortality data from the Dr Foster Unit at Imperial College London was taken into account when these services were registered with the CQC in April 2010.
Mortality data used in this reckoning, it says, also cover two years when the Conservative-led government was in charge.Little demonstrates the problems of the NHS so vividly as the political mud-throwing.
When the six-year-old state law that requires collection of mortality rates was enacted, Dreyer said he and other health officials decided against reporting mortality data for individual surgeons, because they believed state agencies and hospitals would bring about quality improvements by using the physician data internally to identify poor performers and push for improvements.
Until this study, "there was pretty compelling evidence that farms are the main source of lice, but there was no data on mortality," said Volpe at a press conference organized by a nonprofit organization called Pure Salmon, which lobbies for improving salmon farming practices.
Sir Bruce Keogh, the Medical Director of NHS England, said: "Some questions have been raised by the trust's own mortality data and by other information.
