Variation of the rates of necrotising enterocolitis in the neonatal networks in England.

Necrotising enterocolitis is an oft-fatal disease of the intestinal tract in neonates born prematurely and with low birthweight. We study the variation of its rates across the neonatal networks (groups of hospital-based neonatal care units) in England. We illustrate the problematic nature of hypothesis testing for a key decision, which an analysis is meant to inform, and apply an approach based on decision theory. We emphasise the role of sensitivity analysis in dealing with the ambiguity encountered in the process of eliciting information about the perspective of the client or sponsor for whom the analysis is conducted. In the application based on a fiducial distribution, the likelihood is approximated by a linearising transformation of the score function. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.