[EQ] Statistical process control methods in public health intelligence

Statistical process control methods in public health intelligence

Association of Public Health Observatories (APHO)

Available online at: http://www.erpho.org.uk/Download/Public/17155/1/Statistical%20Process%20Control%20FINAL.pdf

 

“…this briefing look at the uses of statistical process control (SPC) methods and associated visual display tools (control charts and funnel plots) in public health intelligence. The briefing provides a summary overview. Updates and more material, including methods and tools to support our Technical Briefing series will be made available through our website at http://www.apho.org.uk

 

“….Public health practice is highly dependent on the effective use of information, and commonly makes comparisons between areas, groups or institutions. Methods based on ranking, such as league tables or percentiles, have a number of flaws. The main problem with ranking is the implicit assumption that apparent differences between organisations are the results of better or poorer performance. Simply because institutions may produce different values for an indicator, and we naturally tend to rank these values, does not mean that we are observing variation in performance. All systems within which institutions operate, no matter how stable, will produce variable outcomes.

 

The questions we need to answer are: ‘Is the observed variation more or less than we would normally expect?’; ‘Are there genuine outliers?’; ‘Are there exceptionally good performers?’; ‘What reasons might there be for excess variation’, and so on. Alternative methods based on understanding variation may be more appropriate…”

 

 

APHO Technical Briefing 3: Commonly Used Public Health Statistics and their Confidence Intervals

 

The Good Indicators Guide: Understanding how to use and choose indicators

Technical Briefing 2: Statistical Process Control methods in public health intelligence

 

Technical Briefing 1: Sources of data on lifestyle risk factors in local populations

 

 

 

 

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