This short blog post on risk ratios is a good refresher if you’re uncertain how to translate a relative risk into lay terms.
Be careful not to confuse relative risk and odds ratios even if the way they’re expressed in lay terms are often similar.
The article “Where Does Risk-Adjusted Mortality Fit Into a Safety Measurement Program?”from the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) provides an in-depth discussion of the risk-adjusted hospital mortality rate, the hospital standardized mortality ratio and the standardized hospital mortality indicator frequently used in hospital performance measures.
The article “Risk-Adjusted Mortality: Problems and Possibilities,” though a bit dated (2012), offers a good discussion of the limitations of “ratio of observed-to-expected deaths” as a hospital quality measure, including concerns related to medical documentation and the severity of a patient’s condition.
Communicating Risk in a Soundbite — This guide, created by the Science Media Centre in the United Kingdom, is aimed at scientists, but it still has a lot to offer journalists since journalists often have to convey the same kind of information with an accurate sense of the risk and appropriate context.