Student blog post: NHS could save £1.7bn from 20 minutes of cycling or walking a day

Feed URL: https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/criticalthinking/2017/02/28/student-blog-post-nhs-could-save-1-7bn-from-20-minutes-of-cycling-or-walking-a-day/feed/?withoutcomments=1

The article from the Evening Standard made a headline that could possibly display signs of a ‘fake story’.
It is using the NHS to complete the story about Sadiq Khan’s new proposal for healthy streets.
Random statistics are thrown into the article without referring to how and who found them. Even though it mentions a ‘transport for london analysis’ and ‘tfl research’ it is untraceable to fact check the accuracy of the statistics. Therefore the correlation made with the NHS and the minutes dedicated to walking or cycling is not something readers cannot take serious.

Also, the headline says the NHS could save 1.7bn from 20 mins of cycling or walking a day, but does it mean it saves this amount for a year? a month? a day? It does not make it specific.

Another flaw to this article is the stats used about how many people would need treatment. How do we know this is down to 20 minutes of walking and cycling? There may be other factors that can result in less people needing treatment, for example not smoking or drinking alcohol. These are huge statistics, not just hundreds but thousands but how did they find this? Surely it is not a complete accurate measure? Was it an average or a median? What population was this gathered from?

For all we know this can be made up statistics unless there is some back up to show how the two statistics correlate which is yet to be discovered.

http://www.standard.co.uk/news/health/nhs-could-save-17bn-if-londoners-walked-or-cycled-for-20-minutes-a-day-a3468396.html

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