The order of the rows of a table also needs to be considered carefully. Table 1.1 shows the hospitals in order of the number of operations in each, but if they had been presented, say, in order of mortality rates with the highest at the top of the table, this might give the impression that this was a valid and important way of comparing hospitals. Such league tables are favoured by the media and even some politicians, but can be grossly misleading: not only because the differences could be due to chance variation, but because the hospitals may be taking in very different types of cases.
