October 2020
The Real Risk service that we designed with University of Cambridge's Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication has been launched.
You can see David Spiegelhalter from the Winton Centre describe how the tool works in this video:
The University of Cambridge team built the tool to help press officers and journalists communicate accurate risk research on issues around health & social sciences.
Headlines abound with the latest research about risks: foods which have been linked to cancer, lifestyles that make heart disease more likely, medications that raise the risk of blood clots, habits associated with bad mental health. The articles written about these issues are often frightening and the numbers used in them are often misleading.
RealRisk converts the specialist statistics used to report research conclusions – including Relative Risks, Odds Ratios and Hazard Ratios – into Absolute Risks which can be more easily understood by everyone. The resulting Absolute Risks are presented in the form of text, icon arrays and bar charts which are free to use.
The team wants to encourage people to report ‘health risk’ stories with numbers that are widely understandable and don’t cause unnecessary anxiety.
