New Essay: Why we should love the database state we're in

Yesterday morning, just after the 7am news, the Today programme ran an article claiming that hospital league tables helped to cut deaths from operations. It followed up something similar in 2007 on an academic study looking at survival rates from heart surgery in the North West of England. Its finding, widely publicised at the time, claimed heart disease had fallen as a consequence of published league tables of surgery mortality rates. (The BBC covered the story like this.) The implication was simple: people look at the figures, and head for the hospitals where they were least likely to die. The findings were controversial. Some thought publishing information on death rates was too crude a tool to help patients make sensible choices. Others worried that heart surgeons would now have a strong incentive to ignore tricky operations, and concentrate only on the easy cases which upped their figures. Yesterday's story suggests the opposite might be true: "the latest analysis suggests that the availability of reliable data on risk has emboldened surgeons to take on more complicated cases."

Today at  Prospect we publish an essay from Tim Kelsey, arguing that such measures can be taken a good deal further. Hospital death rates have only been published since 2001 (and are published, in part, by Kelsey's company Dr. Foster.) But Kelsey, in Long Live The Database State, argues that there are many other areas in which public sector data could be made more widely available — in particular if the concerns of civil liberties campaigners can be overcome. At stake, he claims, "lies a clear tension between two competing social goods: the desire to defend civil liberties and the need for better public services" in which "the small risks of a government holding data on citizens are greatly outweighed by the potential benefits."

Read and debate Tim Kelsey's essay "Long Live the Database State" here