Florence Nightingale and health statistics in 2016

Florence Nightingale and health statistics in 2016

Professor John NewtonChief Knowledge Officer, PHE

PHE briefing for NIHR Board 2013

Florence Nightingale’s polar area graph (1856)

Florence Nightingale as Statistician Author(s): Edwin W. Kopf Source: Publications of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 15, No. 116 (Dec., 1916), pp. 388-404

“The connection between the health and the dwellings of the population is one of the most important that exists.”

Florence Nightingale on the importance of collecting housing data in the 1861 census

Does quantity have a quality all of its own?


The beauty and power of descriptive data

PHE briefing for NIHR Board 2013 Source: Danny Dorling

One-year Survival by stage

y = 0.003x + 0.1241

R² = 0.57

0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%

0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50

Obesity prevalence

Index of Multiple Deprivation 2010 score(High score = more deprived)

obesity prevalence in children aged 10 years by deprivation

9

Child obesity: BMI ≥ 95th centile of the UK90 growth reference

Local authorities in England

11

“The Global Burden of Disease showed the position of health in the UK and that while comparatively there have been a lot of gains, there is still a long way to go….GBD exemplifies the new paradigm in public health. We’re not just looking at one issue at a time anymore.”

13 BIA 2015

GBD: Leading causes of DALYs 1990 & 2013

Figure 1

The Lancet DOI: (10.1016/S0140-6736(15)00128-2)

Risk factors currently included in GBD

“We legislate without knowing what we are doing.

The War Office has some of the finest statistics in the world.

What comes of them? Little or nothing. Why? Because

the Heads do not know how to make anything of them.”

Florence Nightingale in a letter to Benjamin Jowett


Using data, information and technology to make a difference in 2016• Few care systems are truly data and information driven

• Senior managers have become used to managing without timely and relevant information

• Information presented in an engaging and transparent way is much more likely to be used

• Judgments on the balance between confidentiality and use of data often seem arbitrary and approvals process is burdensome


Conclusions• Data and information are interventions that save lives

and improve health

• Health sector has consistently underinvested in capacity and capability for the use of data compared with its generation and collection

• We have more data than ever before but it remains far more difficult to get it and use it than it needs to be

• Projects such as the Global Burden of Disease have shown that these problems can be overcome


Florence Nightingale and health statistics in 2016

Healthcare

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