Statistical information use in hospital settings

¶ … Statistics in the Hospital Setting

During the course of performing my professional duties at College Hospital, which is a psychiatric facility located in Cerritos, California, I encounter patients who are struggling to maintain some semblance of a normal life despite struggling with one or more mental illnesses or psychological impairments. College Hospital is a 187-bed, free-standing psychiatric care unit which is accredited by The Joint Commission and licensed by the California Department of Health Services, and part of my job is assist in providing a wide range of psychiatric services for a wide range of patient demographics. As the leader in Partial Hospitalization Programs throughout the greater Los Angeles and Orange County metropolitan areas, College Hospital relies on the accurate and efficient use of statistics to ensure positive patient outcomes.

An Example of Descriptive Statistics Used in My Workplace:

While working at College Hospital the use of descriptive statistics has become an increasingly important part of my professional life, simply because I continually need to read a wide range of scholarly journals on a variety of psychiatry-related subjects in order to remain effective. These journal articles typically review the findings of studies which employed questionnaire surveys or case notes, and descriptive statistics are used to separate the data into an organized structure which streamlines the interpretation process. Commonly used descriptive statistics I encounter while working, or while studying for my professional duties to come, include 'commitments within the last year,' variables relating to age and gender of the population group, and percentages of variables with positive correlations.

An Example of Inferential Statistics Used in My Workplace:

After reviewing a particular psychiatric study and the various descriptive statistics used to organize data collected within, the next step is to apply several statistical tests to interpret this data while drawing wider conclusions about individual patients or populations. Typically these simple tests of significance are used to infer wider suppositions from a data set, with the most commonly used tests being the ?2-test and the t-test. For example, one of the most commonly employed inferential statistics I have observed my superiors using at College Hosptial is the Kendall tau rank correlation coefficient, which "is a non-parametric statistic used to measure the degree of correspondence between two rankings and to assess the significance of this correspondence which also reliably correlates with human behavioral ratings and reading times" (Costea, et al., 2011). Unless I am capable of comprehending the way descriptive statistics are used within the bulk of psychiatry literature, it is impossible for me to properly apply inferential statistics to influence the treatment, medication, and care of actual patients.

The Four Levels of Measurement Used in My Workplace:

Nominal: In the psychiatric hospital setting nominal measurement is used on a daily basis to monitor the activity and treatment of patients. We count the number of patients who come through intake each day, as well as the number of times they have been admitted or committed for care, in order to record trends in their individual behavior, as well as to track intake in comparison to the facility's capacity. Finally, the administration of pills and other medication is carefully recorded using nominal measurements.

Ordinal: The use of satisfaction surveys is essential in assessing the quality of care and comfort our patients have experienced, and this technique relies upon ordinal measurement. For example, every patient who is checking out after an extended stay at College Hospital is asked to provide answers about their experience using a basic 1-10 scale, with questions about interaction with staff, symptom treatment, and recreational exercise all measured using 1 as "negative" and 10 as "positive."

Interval: While I am not as familiar with this measurement technique as the previous entries, I believe the use of heartbeat monitoring, electrocardiogram, and other diagnostic tools rely on interval scales in their assessment. In particular, I seem to remember hearing the term QT-interval used in discussion regarding patients who are believed to suffer from attention-deficit disorder (ADD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and similar cognitive impairments (Neilsen, et al., 2011).

Ratio: When we ask patients to partake in memory tests or other tests to gauge their cognitive ability, the results are typically recorded and presented using ratio measurement. For example, if 30 patients take the same memory test, one which includes 15 questions, the baseline result for this assessment is 0 correctly recalled items. From there, each participant will provide results which can be understood as a ratio measurement, from 1:15 through 15:15 correctly recalled items.