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Description
Cutting the cost of health care - In this week's More or Less, we looked at a financial health problem where the first attempt at cure was more costly than disease. The problem: How do you cut cost...s in the NHS? The answer: By targeting preventative care on those who cost most. But who are they? In the past we said they were the ones who needed acute care this year. New research suggests this was wrong. The costliest in the future, turn out not to be the costliest now. More or Less found that the policy of targeting preventative care on this year's sick probably costs more money and looks at the new research that may produce more reliable savings. Worthy facts - And we asked you a question. Does every fact worthy of the name have to have a number in it? We brought together the writer of a book called "50 Facts that Should Change the World", a statistician and a philosopher to discuss the suggestion that the only facts that seem to matter these days are expressed numerically. Visualising measurements - And finally, what does a tonne of CO2 look like? We hear this unit of measurement all the time, but does it make any human sense? Thousands, millions of tonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere, too much to picture in a space hard to imagine, measured in a weight that we cannot feel. As climate change fills the news, we looked for a better way of making sense of the quantities.
Cutting the cost of health care - In this week's More or Less, we looked at a financial health problem where the first attempt at cure was more costly than disease. The problem: How do you cut cost...s in the NHS? The answer: By targeting preventative care on those who cost most. But who are they? In the past we said they were the ones who needed acute care this year. New research suggests this was wrong. The costliest in the future, turn out not to be the costliest now. More or Less found that the policy of targeting preventative care on this year's sick probably costs more money and looks at the new research that may produce more reliable savings. Worthy facts - And we asked you a question. Does every fact worthy of the name have to have a number in it? We brought together the writer of a book called "50 Facts that Should Change the World", a statistician and a philosopher to discuss the suggestion that the only facts that seem to matter these days are expressed numerically. Visualising measurements - And finally, what does a tonne of CO2 look like? We hear this unit of measurement all the time, but does it make any human sense? Thousands, millions of tonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere, too much to picture in a space hard to imagine, measured in a weight that we cannot feel. As climate change fills the news, we looked for a better way of making sense of the quantities.
| Series: | More or less |
|---|---|
| Episode | 4 |
| First transmission date: | 2005-07-14 |
| Published: | 2005 |
| Rights Statement: | Rights owned or controlled by The Open University |
| Restrictions on use: | This material can be used in accordance with The Open University conditions of use. A link to the conditions can be found at the bottom of all OU Digital Archive web pages. |
| Duration: | 00:24:20 |
| + Show more... | |
| Producer: | Michael Blastland |
| Contributor: | A. W Dilnot |
| Publisher: | BBC Open University |
| Subject terms: | Mathematical statistics; Social sciences--Statistical methods |
| Production number: | AUDA877A |
| Available to public: | no |
