| Summary: | This thesis looks to use a variety of statistical methods to investigate the performance of hospitals for patients who receive trauma care. Our main motivation comes from data provided by the Trauma Audit Research Network (TARN). Trauma centre performance as measured by the Ws score of Hollis et al. (1995) was formulated from the TRISS (Trauma Injury Severity Score) methodology and is part of an ongoing study to improve trauma care across the UK. However, ring institutional performance and ranking hospitals is a difficult process, particularly in the presence of missing data and for hospitals with few trauma patient records. There are also many political issues arising when using ranking and compiling league tables, see Goldstein and Spiegelhalter (1996). One way to ensure that our assessment of institutional performance is as precise as possible is to make sure that we have quality data, i.e. complete and that our predictions are accurate.
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