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I am not a statistician, but imho this seems to me to be selective negative reporting yet again...can't you print all the results in a funnel plot so we can see where all the Trusts lie and which are outliers positively and which are outliers negatively? For 13 hospitals that are worse than expected there must be 13 hospitals that are better than expected....or am I being statistically naive? Aren't we dancing on the head of a pin? Its all about deviation from a mean isn't it? Above or below. I want to see the whole picture, not just bits of it that make sensational headlines. What about the rest of the results to keep things in perspective?

And why do Dr Fosters seem to operate according to their own timeline and agenda? How do they fit in with the work being done by Keough? Who commissions and quality assures their work? Is it peer reviewed before publishing?

I am heartily sick of all this. As David Spiegelhalter said in his BMJ article after the last Professor Jarmine foot in mouth episode "the crucial fact is that both the SHMI and HSMR are standardised to recent national performance, and so we would expect at any time that around half of all trusts would have 'higher than expected' mortality, just by chance variability around an average" (BMJ 2013;347;f4893)...he adds later "it is enough to make a statistician sob".

anon 4.44pm you say we should ignore the academic arguments...no absolutely not. It would be throwing the NHS to the wolves to ignore academic evidence, and there are many wolves out there waiting for anything remotely negative to further undermine the public's confidence in the NHS, and its helped by one-sided reporting.