Professor David Spiegelhalter is weekly called upon to help translate the statistics presented in research papers into meaningful information for patients and the public. Now, he and the Winton Centre team have released a tool designed to help do this task.

RealRisk helps locate the key numbers in a research paper (usually a relative risk of some kind, like a hazard ratio or odds ratio), and then acts as a calculator to turn these into absolute risks - the numbers that are most useful to communicate. It also creates graphics and helps create sentences that can be used when reporting those numbers.

Alongside the tool, the team are also releasing a series of short videos in which David explains the key concepts - such as absolute versus relative risks, causation versus correlation and what 'adjustment' in a research paper means.

Our hope is that RealRisk is of help to everyone trying to communicate health statistics, from journalists to doctors.

https://realrisk.wintoncentre.uk