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
Half of all hospitals are bound to be worse than average.
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And to complain about that is like saying, like the famous politician who said that he wanted everybody to earn more than the average wage.
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Well, it depends.
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If that number could be just explainable by random variation, then it doesn't suggest anything's wrong at all.
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If it's a bit larger than that, then obviously it deserves further investigation.
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But there is a particular problem with heart surgery on babies because this idea of trying to get an expected mortality is really tricky.
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With adults with heart surgery, actually, there's not that much difference between what can go wrong with an adult heart, and you can standardise for the risk quite well.
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But for babies, there's enormous variability in the type of conditions that they're trying to solve.
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And so calculating the expected is a really imperfect art at the moment.
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And so any hospital that appears to be an outlier, really it only suggests taking just a much more careful look at the data and looking for whether that hospital might be treating particular types of patients.
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We know there's far too much.
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Showing 341–351 of 351 · page 18 of 18
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