Though the government has promised to maintain real-terms spending on the NHS, healthcare managers are under severe pressure to find savings, in order to find room to cope with growing demands for care and the costs of the massive reorganisation the government has pushed through. Attention turns to ‘productivity’. Sir David Nicholson, chief executive of the NHS Commissioning Board, has demanded NHS trusts in England find £20billion worth of productivity

Adverts for financial products say – though usually in tiny print at the bottom of the page – past performance is no guide to how things will be in future. Stuff happens, such as banks collapsing, stock markets imploding, wars, pestilence (and their opposites, too, booms and prolonged prosperity included). Put the point in the sort of language statisticians use and you might say extrapolating from yesterday’s trends makes for a dubious

With advances in technologies like cancer screening, we need to be as clear as possible when stating results in terms of probabilities It’s not just patients who sometimes find risks and probabilities difficult to understand. Doctors can be challenged by them too. In an experiment in 2004, psychologist Professor Gigerenzer and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development set a group of experienced doctors the following problem: About 1% of women

NHS Choices reckons health reporting has been improving with ‘wonder cures’ hitting the headlines less often and peer-reviewed medial reports covered more responsibly. But the paper illustrated, the Daily Express, is a ‘dishonourable exception’ to the trend, according to the Department of Health-supported information site, which monitors how reports of new therapies and treatments are handled by the media. However ‘headlines can often give a different impression’. Rely on them and you

In a couple of months, the Administrative Data Task Force chaired by Sir Alan Langlands is due to report. Langlands, chief executive of the Higher Education Funding Council for England, is working on behalf of the Department of Business Innovation and Skills and the research councils on how the mass of data collected by public agencies about individuals and households might be pressed into more fruitful use. More intense use

The Health and Social Care Act now coming into force will have profound and – it’s argued – damaging consequences for fairness in healthcare. The basis for NHS data now becomes care commissioning groups and that switch may undermine the availability of the information that’s vital for monitoring who gets to access services, where and how. An article in the British Medical Journal argues that area based structures for collecting data and

On tour and coming to a town near you……a comedy sketch  ”Your Days Are Numbered: the maths of death” which explores the dark side of the statistics which inform health campaigns. The show in which comedy duo, Timandra Harness and Matt  Parker “cut through the daily dose of stats and facts prescribed to us all with clinical precision, animated skeletons and the obligatory graphs” went down a storm at the Edinburgh

                The recently published Health Survey for England has a chapter on sexual health containing the following nugget of information:  ‘men reported a mean of 9.3 female sexual partners in their life so far, while women reported a mean of 4.7 male sexual partners’. That simple sentence raises a large number of statistical issues, starting with the arithmetical fact that the two means should

With the changes in guidelines from the National Health Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) to allow women the choice of having a caesarean section, risk measurement is in the news. During pregnancy there are a lot of choices for women to make such as where to have the baby and what type of pain relief they want during labour.  Now there is another choice to make and risks and benefits

Behind the Headlines is as good a medical consultation as you will get in many surgeries. It provides an unbiased and evidence-based analysis of health stories that make the news. Sir Muir Gray, the NHS chief knowledge officer (pictured), stands at one pole, the Daily Express newsroom at the other. NHS Choices demolishes the exaggeration, error and false causation that is the staple of so much media coverage of pharmaceutical