Theme 9 Flashcards
what is EBHC
“the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of the current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients”
what does EBHC take into consideration (4)
- contextual factors
- health worker’s expertise acquired through clinical practice and experience
- current best evidence obtained from clinically relevant research
- patient values
Importance of synthesizing evidence (5)
- Need to qualify outcomes
- Many effective tx(alternatives)
- Costs
- Info overload/ need for synthesis
- Changing patient-physician relationship
aim of reviews (4)
Readable summary of all evidence
Unbiased reporting of evidence
Transparency
Up-to-date
Narrative Review
- Qualitative, narrative summary of evidence on a given topic
- Written by expert in field (generally)
- Typically involve informal and subjective methods to collect and interpret info
(think of what we did in our pharm project)
Systematic review definition
Summary of literature that uses explicit and reproducible methods to systematically search, critically appraise, and synthesize on a specific issue. It synthesizes the results of multiple primary studies related to each other by using strategies that reduce biases and random errors””
Need for systematic review
- efficient way to access the body of research ( saves time , critical appraisal, interpretation of results)
- explore dif btwn studies
- reliable basis for decision making
- clearly stated objectives and question
- pre-defined eligibility criteria
- comprehensive systematic review
- explicit, reproducible methods
- assessment of validity of included studies
Types of bias minimized by a systematic review
publication / language/ indexing/file-drawer
Application of meta-analysis (3)
Intervention – estimate efficacies and risk of TX
Diagnostic tests – provide more reliable estimates of diagnostic accuracy of test
Epidemiology – to provide more reliable estimate of risks
what is statistics (definition)
“Statistics is the science of collecting, summarizing, presenting and interpreting data, and of using data to estimate the magnitude of associations and test hypotheses.”
types of statistics
- Descriptive statistics
2. Analytic statistics
Descriptive statistics
Methods to summarise and present data
Analytic statistics
Methods to test associations and draw inferences from the sample to a population
Why we need statistics (3)
- Statistics is a way of handling variability.
- It allows us to separate out the real effect from that which could have happened due to chance variability (random error).
- It allows us to make inferences about a larger population from a smaller sample
types of variables ( 2 main types and 5 subtypes)
Categorical variables
a. Nominal
b. Ordinal
c. Binary
Numerical / Quantitative variables
a. Discrete
b. Continuous
Nominal variables
Categorical variable
Categories in no order, are identified by name
e.g. gender, marital status, ethnic group
Ordinal variables
Categorical variable
There is some order and can be recorded in categories
e.g. socio-economic status, severity of a disease