BMJ  2005;330 (23 April), doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7497.0

Catch me as soon as you can

Rodney Ledward, a British gynaecologist whose multiple malpractices resulted in suspension in 1996, could have been identified from routinely collected hospital episode data before the scandal broke. Harley and colleagues (p 929) propose a statistical method for scanning multi-indicator, multi-year data in order to identify hospital doctors whose performance is not satisfactory and whose practice may need revising. Testing the method retrospectively on gynaecologists, they successfully identified Rodney Ledward, but they warn that interpretation of similar outliers is still unclear and further prospective evaluation of what seems to be a robust new method is needed.

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