Making Sense of Statistics in Healthcare

Anna Hart is a Principal Lecturer in statistics in the Faculty of Science at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston and Honorary Fellow at the University of Exeter, UK. She specialises in the teaching of medical statistics and acts as consultant for clinical trials. In this book, she places emphasis on the role of the statistician and the need to involve one if doing any kind of research study. This book has been written for anyone who ‘wants to make sense of medical statistics’ to be able to understand published studies, embark on their own studies, discuss statistical concepts in the context of real studies and statistical science in practice, be able to make informed judgements and show how to combine formal results with common and clinical sense. It describes different study designs, various types of data, interpretation of charts and graphs and the detection of cheating. It then further outlines summary statistics, discusses normal and skewed distributions, defines P-values and describes relationships between variables.

The book gives the reader a clear and simple overview of how to plan and conduct a study, how to decide what statistics to use and how to evaluate other people’s work, since limitations and issues arising in medical studies show the need to evaluate data critically. Even the best scientists can be biased and take more notice of evidence that supports what they are trying to show. Hart explains how the choice of the format in which information is presented can significantly influence clinical decisions and that common sense should not be abandoned when summarising data. Finally, it is pointed out that statistical significance does not always imply practical significance.

This book is a scientific approach to lead medical researchers through the jungle of questions about statistics and offers satisfactorily concise answers to very general issues.