Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter
speaker
351 appearances
17 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2010
last heard Jan 2021
Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I think there's some really deep lessons to get from such a ridiculous figure as Paul.
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I'm afraid my statistic for 2010 is rather sad.
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It's trying to look at the risks faced by people serving in Afghanistan at the moment.
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If we looked at over the summer, over a 10-week period, 23 deaths, and that's out of about 10,000 people who are serving there every day.
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And we can convert that to a unit that we've heard about in more or less, the micromort, which is a one in a million chance of death.
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And that means that every man and woman serving in Afghanistan on average was facing 33 micromorts a day.
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And to get that in some sort of context, that's the equivalent of the risk that one would face for a 200-mile ride on a motorbike on average.
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So that's getting some idea of the scale of risk being faced on average by people serving in Afghanistan.
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We were looking at the deaths of babies who had heart surgery in 11 English hospitals over a period of nine years.
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And we looked at how many babies died in each hospital and compared it with how many would have been expected in roughly similar patients if they'd been operated on in an average hospital.
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And so every hospital gets an observed number of deaths and an expected number of deaths.
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But you can also take the difference between those.
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So if a hospital was expected to, say, get 50 deaths and they observed 60 deaths, you take the difference, the mortality difference, you get 10 extra deaths.
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Now, these have been sometimes called excess deaths.
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I've used that phrase myself.
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I deeply regret it and I hope never to use it again because it's so easy to misinterpret mortality.
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They took the hospitals that had more deaths than would be expected.
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It's a bit like saying, you know, that had more than the average number of deaths.
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And they added up all these so-called excess deaths and got to a total of 78 and reported these as being possibly needless deaths.
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But I was arguing later in the letter to the paper that this was inappropriate because
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Showing 321–340 of 351 · page 17 of 18
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