FIVE hospital trusts in the region have been named as among the safest in the country for hip surgery.

The trusts, which include North Tees and Hartlepool, Newcastle, York, South Tyneside and Northallerton feature in a guide published by The Times newspaper.

The Times Hospital Consultants Guide Part 1 includes death rates for patients undergoing surgery for a broken hip at all the English NHS hospital trusts.

The guide reveals a wide variation in death rates for this type of surgery, with patients four times more likely to die in some hospitals than others after undergoing the procedure.

It also reveals that patients are 60 per cent more likely to die if they are made to wait longer than two days for this form of surgery.

The fracture is not usually the cause of death. It is usually caused by an infection or pneumonia after operation or by heart failure or stroke.

A typical broken hip patient is a frail, elderly person. A tenth of these patients die within a month, a quarter die within six months.

Trust figures ranked according to a formula, which gives a score of 100 where the number of deaths was exactly as expected. Trusts with scores lower than 100 are doing better than expected.

It also gives the percentage of patients who waited longer than two days for hip operations (in brackets below).

The scores are: North Tees and Hartlepool 75 (9), Newcastle Hospitals 69 (13), York 65 (11), South Tyneside 58 (21), Northallerton 50 (6).

No North-East trusts feature in the section devoted to hospitals which have high death rates.