As part of a collaborative initiative, Alex Bottle was an adviser in a ground-breaking project that lets Canadians rate and compare their hospitals.

Alex Bottle, Senior Lecturer in Medical Stastics and Chief Statistican at the Dr Foster Unit, was a member of an expert panel advising on the analysis and presentation of performance data for Canada’s Rate My Hospital website that went live in April 2013. The project was run by the CBC’s “fifth estate” investigative team and used data on readmissions, safety events and post-operative mortality from the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI); survey information were also available for 132 hospitals, mostly in Ontario. For the first time, Canadians have been able to compare hospitals on these measures and also rate their hospital on five aspects of experience, including whether they would recommend it to others – the “friends and family” test that has just been published in England in July 2013. The aim of the project has also been to stimulate debate around transparency in Canada.

As part of the website’s launch, Alex held a dozen radio slots and a live web chat.  One of his radio interviews can be found in full on the CBC Player in which he talks about some of the challenges of measuring hospital performance and the experience of doing so in the UK.