Factors affecting likelihood of applicants being offered a place in medical schools in the United Kingdom in 1996 and 1997: retrospective study

Several errors occurred in this article by McManus (24 October, pp 1111-1117). It was not made clear that the whole of the first paragraph was a quotation from the 1986 paper by Horton (cited as reference 1). In table 2 the results for the University of Birmingham were wrong: the symbol • should have appeared in three additional rows— “has made an insurance choice,” “is female,” and “is from an ethnic minority.” In figure 3 the odds ratio for Birmingham for 1997 should have been 1.526 (95% CI 1.1616 to 2.007), placing it between Glasgow and Leicester; the values for 1996 are correct but in the wrong position (further details of the corrected analysis are available at www.cvcp.ac.uk/chms/).