Health Statistics

The World health statistics 2020 report is the annual compilation of health statistics for 194 Member States. It summarizes trends in life expectancy and causes of death and reports on progress towards the health and health-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and associated targets.

Understanding risk -- Putting risk in perspective -- Risk charts : a way to get perspective -- Judging the benefit of a health intervention -- Not all benefits are equal : understand the outcome -- Consider the downsides -- Do the benefits outweight the downsides? -- Beware of exaggerated importance -- Beware of exaggerated certainty -- Who's behind the numbers?

Focusing on quantative approaches to investigating problems, this title introduces the basics rules and principles of statistics, encouraging the reader to think critically about data analysis and research design, and how these factors can impact upon evidence-based practice.

The 5th edition of this popular introduction to statistics for the medical and health sciences has undergone a significant revision, with several new chapters added and examples refreshed throughout the book. Yet it retains its central philosophy to explain medical statistics with as little technical detail as possible, making it accessible to a wide audience. Helpful multi-choice exercises are included at the end of each chapter, with answers provided at the end of the book. Each analysis technique is carefully explained and the mathematics kept to minimum. Written in a style suitable for statisticians and clinicians alike, this edition features many real and original examples, taken from the authors' combined many years' experience of designing and analysing clinical trials and teaching statistics. Students of the health sciences, such as medicine, nursing, dentistry, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, and radiography should find the book useful, with examples relevant to their disciplines. The aim of training courses in medical statistics pertinent to these areas is not to turn the students into medical statisticians but rather to help them interpret the published scientific literature and appreciate how to design studies and analyse data arising from their own projects. However, the reader who is about to design their own study and collect, analyse and report on their own data will benefit from a clearly written book on the subject which provides practical guidance to such issues. The practical guidance provided by this book will be of use to professionals working in and/or managing clinical trials, in academic, public health, government and industry settings, particularly medical statisticians, clinicians, trial co-ordinators. Its practical approach will appeal to applied statisticians and biomedical researchers, in particular those in the biopharmaceutical industry, medical and public health organisations.

Blackwell Publishing is delighted to announce that this book hasbeen Highly Commended in the 2004 BMA Medical Book Competition.Here is the judges' summary of this book: "This is a technical book on a technical subject but presentedin a delightful way. There are many books on statistics for doctorsbut there are few that are excellent and this is certainly one ofthem. Statistics is not an easy subject to teach or write about.The authors have succeeded in producing a book that is as good asit can get. For the keen student who does not want a book formathematicians, this is an excellent first book on medicalstatistics." Essential Medical Statistics is a classic amongst medicalstatisticians. An introductory textbook, it presents statisticswith a clarity and logic that demystifies the subject, whileproviding a comprehensive coverage of advanced as well as basicmethods. The second edition of Essential Medical Statistics hasbeen comprehensively revised and updated to include modernstatistical methods and modern approaches to statistical analysis,while retaining the approachable and non-mathematical style of thefirst edition. The book now includes full coverage of the mostcommonly used regression models, multiple linear regression,logistic regression, Poisson regression and Cox regression, as wellas a chapter on general issues in regression modelling. Inaddition, new chapters introduce more advanced topics such asmeta-analysis, likelihood, bootstrapping and robust standarderrors, and analysis of clustered data. Aimed at students of medical statistics, medical researchers,public health practitioners and practising clinicians usingstatistics in their daily work, the book is designed as both ateaching and a reference text. The format of the book is clear withhighlighted formulae and worked examples, so that all concepts arepresented in a simple, practical and easy-to-understand way. Thesecond edition enhances the emphasis on choice of appropriatemethods with new chapters on strategies for analysis and measuresof association and impact. Essential Medical Statistics is supported by a web siteat www.blackwellpublishing.com/essentialmedstats. Thisuseful online resource provides statistical datasets to download,as well as sample chapters and future updates.

Statistics for the Health Sciences is a highly readable and accessible textbook on understanding statistics for the health sciences, both conceptually and via the SPSS programme. The authors give clear explanations of the concepts underlying statistical analyses and descriptions of how these analyses are applied in health science research without complex maths formulae. The textbook takes students from the basics of research design, hypothesis testing and descriptive statistical techniques through to more advanced inferential statistical tests that health science students are likely to encounter. The strengths and weaknesses of different techniques are critically appraised throughout, and the authors emphasise how they may be used both in research and to inform best practice care in health settings. Exercises and tips throughout the book allow students to practice using SPSS. The companion website provides further practical experience of conducting statistical analyses. Features include: • multiple choice questions for both student and lecturer use • full Powerpoint slides for lecturers • practical exercises using SPSS • additional practical exercises using SAS and R This is an essential textbook for students studying beginner and intermediate level statistics across the health sciences.

Experts estimate that as many as 98,000 people die in any given year from medical errors that occur in hospitals. That's more than die from motor vehicle accidents, breast cancer, or AIDSâ€"three causes that receive far more public attention. Indeed, more people die annually from medication errors than from workplace injuries. Add the financial cost to the human tragedy, and medical error easily rises to the top ranks of urgent, widespread public problems. To Err Is Human breaks the silence that has surrounded medical errors and their consequenceâ€"but not by pointing fingers at caring health care professionals who make honest mistakes. After all, to err is human. Instead, this book sets forth a national agendaâ€"with state and local implicationsâ€"for reducing medical errors and improving patient safety through the design of a safer health system. This volume reveals the often startling statistics of medical error and the disparity between the incidence of error and public perception of it, given many patients' expectations that the medical profession always performs perfectly. A careful examination is made of how the surrounding forces of legislation, regulation, and market activity influence the quality of care provided by health care organizations and then looks at their handling of medical mistakes. Using a detailed case study, the book reviews the current understanding of why these mistakes happen. A key theme is that legitimate liability concerns discourage reporting of errorsâ€"which begs the question, "How can we learn from our mistakes?" Balancing regulatory versus market-based initiatives and public versus private efforts, the Institute of Medicine presents wide-ranging recommendations for improving patient safety, in the areas of leadership, improved data collection and analysis, and development of effective systems at the level of direct patient care. To Err Is Human asserts that the problem is not bad people in health careâ€"it is that good people are working in bad systems that need to be made safer. Comprehensive and straightforward, this book offers a clear prescription for raising the level of patient safety in American health care. It also explains how patients themselves can influence the quality of care that they receive once they check into the hospital. This book will be vitally important to federal, state, and local health policy makers and regulators, health professional licensing officials, hospital administrators, medical educators and students, health caregivers, health journalists, patient advocatesâ€"as well as patients themselves. First in a series of publications from the Quality of Health Care in America, a project initiated by the Institute of Medicine

Students and researchers in the health sciences are faced with greater opportunity and challenge than ever before. The opportunity stems from the explosion in publicly available data that simultaneously informs and inspires new avenues of investigation. The challenge is that the analytic tools required go far beyond the standard methods and models of basic statistics. This textbook aims to equip health care researchers with the most important elements of a modern health analytics toolkit, drawing from the fields of statistics, health econometrics, and data science. This textbook is designed to overcome students’ anxiety about data and statistics and to help them to become confident users of appropriate analytic methods for health care research studies. Methods are presented organically, with new material building naturally on what has come before. Each technique is motivated by a topical research question, explained in non-technical terms, and accompanied by engaging explanations and examples. In this way, the authors cultivate a deep (“organic”) understanding of a range of analytic techniques, their assumptions and data requirements, and their advantages and limitations. They illustrate all lessons via analyses of real data from a variety of publicly available databases, addressing relevant research questions and comparing findings to those of published studies. Ultimately, this textbook is designed to cultivate health services researchers that are thoughtful and well informed about health data science, rather than data analysts. This textbook differs from the competition in its unique blend of methods and its determination to ensure that readers gain an understanding of how, when, and why to apply them. It provides the public health researcher with a way to think analytically about scientific questions, and it offers well-founded guidance for pairing data with methods for valid analysis. Readers should feel emboldened to tackle analysis of real public datasets using traditional statistical models, health econometrics methods, and even predictive algorithms. Accompanying code and data sets are provided in an author site: https://roman-gulati.github.io/statistics-for-health-data-science/