Critical Appraisal on the report and questionnaire of the People’s Watch on the Hospital Authority (March 2004)

1. The response rate was too low (only 9.7%) to draw any meaningful conclusion. Any conclusion, if drawn, would be severely biased. Those who carried out this study should have been fully aware of this point.
2. The design of the questions was of very poor quality:
a. only two responses were provided for each question
b. description of certain events (not amount to facts) were provided instead of questions asked, and the two responses provided for each description could not be reasonably or logically interpreted as the response to the description
c. the descriptions and responses were leading in nature
3. Conclusion drawn was not supported by the results.

Inference:

1. I personally thought that there was much inadequacy of the Hospital Authority, but I threw the questionnaire right away when it reached me because of the above reasons. This might also explain the exceptionally low response rate.
2. To design and report a statistally flaw study intentionally was not ethical.
3. To test our hypothesis, we needed to let data and evidence speak honestly for or against it. Otherwise diasters might result from someone’s “good intention”, and there were too many stories in history to illustrate this.