Comment Re:Statistics can be misleading (Score 1) 152
On Question Time Anna Soubry (Under-Secretary of State for Health) said that some doctors schedule more at-risk surgeries on a Friday because then they will be able to deal with the patient during the weekend when they don't have surgeries planned.
They control for the type of procedure, so you can rule out the obvious confounding factor of scheduling procedures that are inherently more dangerous for later in the week. It doesn't tell you about the differences between the individual patients, of course ("this hip replacement's going to much trickier than that one, so I'll do it on Friday") but the numbers do not provide any evidence for the hypothesis that this kind of schedule-shuffling is going on. Comparing between types of procedures, the numbers for risk (Table 1, toward the bottom) look pretty flat, with the obvious (and unsurprising) exception that procedures performed on the weekend tend to be lower risk. Between Mondays and Fridays, there's essentially no difference at all.
You do need to be careful when you want to find explanations for statistics like these.
Stupid researchers! They never thought of that! [rolls eyes]