Florence Nightingale, William Farr and Competing Risks

Summary Competing risks consider time to first event and type of first event. This subdiscipline of survival analysis is challenging in that multiple hazards determine the outcome probabilities. The paper demonstrates that Nightingale and Farr were aware of these connections in their co-operative work in hospital epidemiology.

At the fourth International Statistical Congress (in London, 1860), they suggested forms for reporting hospital mortality that were conceptually more complete than many reported competing risks analyses today.