Probophilia

Civitas, 18 August 2010

In this article, written for Civitas, Dr Peter Davies and Dr Adrian Kenny, two GPs from Yorkshire, draw on an amusing medical analogy – probophilia – to describe a painful affliction across UK public services today – not least the NHS.  ‘The probophile’, Davies and Kenny write, ‘ places false confidence in numbers , and uses these as his focus for justification of activity, whilst losing sight of what the organisation is actually set up to deliver.  The sufferer is either oblivious to his affliction, or if aware falls into learned helplessness and just does what the organisation demands (and sometimes cynically pockets the cash).  Fundamentally it is based on the ability of spreadsheets to analyse data without any matching ability going into primary thought about what data is being measured or why it counts for anything’.  Have a read: it is unnervingly widespread and surely represents one of the biggest challenges the Coalition Government faces.