Questions for Dr Foster

EDITOR—I was interested in two aspects of Little's article.1 One is that the motivation for setting up the Dr Foster organisation came from a “particularly horrendous experience” in a maternity unit. This implies an agenda that is not limited to the objective gathering of data.

The second is the funding. I've been interested that a small organisation can apparently gather data that official bodies—such as the Department of Health—find too difficult or too expensive to obtain. Does Dr Foster pay NHS trusts for their time and trouble in gathering the data that it sells on? Does the Department of Health provide it with free information? Does Dr Foster publish a list of the organisations who have underwritten it? Little's words seemed very carefully chosen when she quoted what Dr Foster said about its financial backers.