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A fully funded PhD studentship is available the University of Exeter Medical School including a stipend of £14,296 per annum (based on the full-time 16/17 rate). The project title is "Estimating the impact of organisational variation in the absence of reliable measurements" and will be supervised by Gary Abel along with John Campbell and William Henley. Full details (including of the application process) can be found at http://www.exeter.ac.uk/studying/funding/award/?id=2183 Project description Indicators of healthcare organisation performance and activity levels are now commonplace in many countries. One of the motivating reasons for collating (and publishing) such data is to encourage quality improvement efforts. Often these indicators are based on small numbers and as such the uncertainty may be large due to the role of chance. This chance will introduce an additional source of variability such that the apparent variability between organisations may be much larger than the true variability in the underlying construct that the indicator is attempting to capture. As such the importance of organisational variation is often overstated. Modern statistical tools such as generalised linear mixed models allow us to detect and quantify variability. Importantly these models allow the role of chance to be accounted for, revealing the magnitude of underlying variation. However, whilst it is possible to estimate the between organisation variance using such models, when reliability is low, the position of any one organisation in the spectrum of performance/activity will not be known with any degree of certainty. Consequently assessing the impact of organisational variability when we do not know the underlying performance/activity for each organisation is not straightforward. The purpose of this studentship is to develop and assess methodology applicable in such situations. A set of real indicators in use in English general primary care will be used, most likely employing the Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) which holds primary care records for around 7% of the English population. Given its content the studentship would be particularly suited to an individual with a statistics background and someone comfortable manipulating data and programming/coding. Informal enquires should be made to Gary Abel ([log in to unmask]) You may leave the list at any time by sending the command SIGNOFF allstat to [log in to unmask], leaving the subject line blank.