About us

University College London: Dr Christina Pagel is a Reader in Operational Research (a branch of applied mathematics) at University College London, applying maths to problems in the NHS. She works very closely with doctors and other clinical staff, mainly at Great Ormond Street Hospital, to help them use routinely collected data to improve NHS services. Her work currently focuses on two areas: 1) care for children requiring heart surgery and 2) how specialist intensive care is organised for children who need it (for whatever reason).

Christina helped developed a statistical method called PRAiS to let hospitals and the national audit body easily monitor survival outcomes after heart surgery in children. In this project, Christina worked with Sense about Science, the University of Cambridge, King’s College London and the Children’s Heart Federation to develop these online resources to help people interpret the audit body’s published results. In particular, she wrote a lot of the content, helped enormously by feedback from the team and the user workshops. Thanks to Dr Andrew Wilshere for designing our logo.

Professor David Spiegelhalter is a statistician from Cambridge University. He has worked for many years with doctors from Great Ormond Street Hospital on monitoring outcomes following surgery for congenital heart disease, and led the statistical team at the Bristol Royal Infirmary Inquiry. He is particularly interested in transparent communication, and was part of the team that drew up the new national patient information leaflets for breast cancer screening. For this project, David helped write the content, especially the language around the statistical formula and predicted range.

Mike Pearson has created many visualisations and interactives for Understanding Uncertainty, NRICH, PLUS, and Wild.maths.org. He developed this website and its data visualisations, attending the focus groups and working closely with Sense about Science and the video animation team, Qudos.

Dr Tim Rakow is a Reader in Psychology who studies how people make choices and how best to provide information to help people make decisions. He has previously worked with the cardiologists and heart surgeons at Great Ormond Street looking at their decisions about surgery, and with Professor Spiegelhalter on the public’s understanding of complex statistical information. For this project, he worked with Emily Blackshaw, another psychologist at King’s College London, to run experiments that examined which types of explanation and graphics would be the best ones for us to include in this website.

Sense About Science is an independent campaigning charity that challenges the misrepresentation of science and scientific evidence in public life. They advocate openness and honesty about research findings and work to ensure the public interest in sound science and evidence is represented and recognised in public discussion and policy making.

Sense about Science has collaborated on a number of highly successful Public Engagement Partnerships, to help scientists to communicate their research findings simply and accurately by co-developing resources with the intended audience. Two of their team, Emily Jesper, Head of Partnerships and Governance and Joanne Thomas, Projects and Events Coordinator were involved in this project. They provided expertise in communicating complex scientific information and facilitated 8 user-testing workshops with parents, other interested users and members of the public to test that the information and animations on the website are clear, accessible and coherent.

The Children’s Heart Federation is the main umbrella body for British CHD charities and voluntary organisations. They publicised this project among their members and coordinated the involvement of parents of children who had heart surgery in our workshops.