Measuring the unmeasurable

When we look at treatments for children’s ill health, we tend to be stuck in a pleasant dilemma. We normally want to use treatments to stop kids dying, and to make them better quicker—but it is uncommon for children to die, and they will often get better anyway. So we end up using alternative outcome measures, be they called a proxy or surrogate or sometimes even a process measure. What is the difference anyway?

Using …