What’s in a number? Communicating risk through real-world examples

Abstract

“Don’t worry, it’s more dangerous driving here than having the anaesthetic”. This statement may be reassuring, but it isn’t true. Despite its falsehood, it is often quoted as it evokes a visceral response that suggests the procedure is low risk.Communicating risks and probabilities to our patients is an everyday occurrence for clinicians - but are we correctly understood? Are we over-reliant on numerical expressions of risk? Could comparative examples of probabilities aid the understanding of risk?In this article the communication of numerical probability in healthcare is examined and a table of commonly used probabilities aims to improve understanding by converting numerical expressions into more tangible, real-world, examples.To allay a patient’s fear of awareness it is perhaps reassuring to know that you are more likely to guess my four-digit bank personal identification number first time than experience awareness during a general anaesthetic. Conversely, and providing much less reassurance, taking ten trips into space with NASA is safer, in terms of 30-day mortality, than an emergency laparotomy in the UK.Clinicians are invited to trial this method for communicating probability, in carefully chosen circumstances, and read the cues and outcomes from the communication that follows.