The use of statistics is a helpful tool utilized in a variety of fields. However, there are areas the successful functioning and development of which would suffer considerably without the application of such a tool. Health care is one of the industries the utilization of statistics in which allows promoting its benefits and eliminating drawbacks. The identification of the main statistical trends allows health institutions and their employees to keep track of patients’ conditions, collect important data, and perform high-quality research.
The significance of statistics in the quality and safety of health care cannot be overestimated. One of the most prominent functions enabled by the use of statistical data is the surveillance of patient safety. For instance, a healthcare provider can evaluate the level of safety using collecting data from electronic health records (Leite et al., 2016). Specifically, the most typical adverse effects of a certain drug or vaccine can be determined with the help of statistical measures. Such findings enable doctors and nurses to come up with the most appropriate dosage or even refuse from using some vaccine if statistics show a predominantly negative effect. The quality of care can also be assessed using statistical data. On the one hand, physicians can detect health changes in patients with the help of statistical process control techniques (Baldewijns et al., 2015). On the other hand, statistics can be employed to collect and process patients’ feedback about their satisfaction with the quality of care received at a certain institution.
Furthermore, it is possible to increase the success of efforts aimed at health promotion and leadership with the help of statistics. For one thing, statistics enable healthcare professionals to monitor patient data at their institution and compare results to national and international ones. By doing so, hospitals will be able to see to what extent the quality of care provided by them meets general expectations. If the indicators at a specific institution are lower than overall in the country, the administration may decide to alter its strategies, which leads to improved health promotion activities. For another thing, by gathering evidence of medical errors and malpractice, hospital administration can effectively change leaders who do not correspond to the expected level of care by those who demonstrate better results.
In our healthcare organization, much attention is paid to the utilization of statistical data. First of all, the administration believes that statistics help to obtain the most valid and credible results of employees’ work and patients’ health indicators. Additionally, statistical knowledge is of great help in the process of decision-making. For instance, a nurse does not have to choose the dosage of some medicine but can consult reliable statistics demonstrating what the most appropriate dosage is. Statistical data in the institution are obtained from electronic health records and patient surveys. Every day, nurses collect new information, which is processed by specialists and analyzed along with the existing data.
Without statistics, the sphere of health care would not have been able to gain the results it currently has. Statistical data help both in large research projects and everyday operations performed by medical staff. The use of statistics guarantees better patient outcomes, higher satisfaction, and fewer medical errors. Healthcare providers can enhance the efforts in health promotion at local, national, and international levels due to reliable information drawn from statistics.
References
Baldewijns, G., Luca, S., Nagels, W., Vanrumste, B., & Croonenborghs, T. (2015). Automatic detection of health changes using statistical process control techniques on measured transfer times of elderly. 2015 37th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC). Web.
Leite, A., Andrews, N. J., & Thomas, S. L. (2016). Near real-time vaccine safety surveillance using electronic health records – A systematic review of the application of statistical methods. Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety, 25(3), 225–237. Web.