The importance of health service statistics

Not only was Florence Nightingale the lady with the lamp, but also she was passionate about statistics. During the Crimean war, she realised that disease was the enemy. Each month in the first winter, up to 40% of patients in her ward died. Eighteen months later, she had reduced the rate to just 2%. She did this by improving hygiene but, as with much of her other work, also by using statistics to show that a serious problem existed and to suggest how it could be tackled.

You only need to glance at newspapers nowadays to see major articles about the health service. As just one example, stories about infections acquired in hospitals make big headlines. Other typical - all too typical, you might say - headlines might be rather like any of the following:

• "Waiting times for outpatients double"
• "NHS is short of 10,000 nurses"
• "More people living longer with heart disease"
• "Fewer babies born to teenagers"
• "1 in 10 A&E patients waiting on trolleys"
• "No winter bed crisis this year"
• "Increase in elderly finding places in care homes"

Health service statisticians will have been involved in the work that lies behind the headlines and the serious articles. It is the statistician's role in the health service to define and collect data from clinical information systems to describe what is happening in our hospitals and across the whole of the health service with the aim of improving the quality of services for patients.