Context
Prof. Jane Hutton, Professor of Medical Statistics at the University of Warwick, has made detailed public commentary on the Letby shift-rota chart across 2023–2025. Her specific area — statistical evidence in medical-legal contexts — makes her analysis operationally precise in a way general-purpose statistical commentary sometimes is not.
The four specific failures Hutton identifies
- Rate vs count conflation. A nurse who works more shifts will be present at more events. The chart did not adjust for attendance rate.
- Wrong denominator. Should be all events on the unit; was selected-as-suspicious subset. Texas-sharpshooter problem in statistical-evidence form.
- No null-hypothesis comparison. Statistical inference requires comparison to a null model. Chart presented pattern without baseline comparison.
- Pattern-matching against selected subset. Cannot rule out chance or cluster-of-correlated-events explanations.
Why medical-statistics expertise matters
Medical-legal statistical cases require more than general statistical competence. They require understanding of clinical data generation, of institutional data handling, of how hospital records are structured, and of what medical decision-making can and cannot be inferred from recorded events. Hutton’s research track record is at this specific intersection.
Read alongside
Prof. Jane Hutton — biography, The Bayesian framework, The base-rate problem, Statistics deep-dive.