Photo: Enrique Saldivar via Flickr

Over the years, I’ve presented on reporting medical research findings. Some of the most common questions I get are about writing the findings using accessible language that an average person can understand. It’s particularly difficult when the outcome is reported in units like standard deviations, but reporting hazard ratios and odds ratios can be confusing as well, especially for those who only occasionally write about medical studies.

A new resource from the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at Cambridge University in the UK can help you make sense of those findings and even provide the language and graphics to help your audience understand the results. RealRisk is the brainchild of professor David Spiegelhalter, the center’s chair, a statistician and author of The Art of Statistics, and Executive Director Alexandra Freeman, who told me more about the tool. Continue reading →