In healthcare, statistics have a critical application because they help healthcare professionals to make evidence-based decisions, improve care delivery, enhance patient outcomes, and advance hospitals’ quality. Oster and Enders (2018) recommend that healthcare providers have statistical competence to boost their capacity to consume research findings and translate them into practice and further studies. An increasing body of knowledge compels healthcare providers to update their practices to be in line with novel results which are reliable and useful in delivering care. Moreover, the quality improvement of procedures, processes, and systems requires continual research activities through statistics. According to Guetterman (2019), statistics offer a systematic and rigorous process of generating valid and reliable healthcare findings. For healthcare providers, including nurses, managers, and physicians, to deliver optimal care, they apply statistical analyses to adopt evidence-based practices. In this view, this paper focuses on examining the application of statistics in healthcare aspects of quality, safety, promotion, and leadership, along with the routine application in nursing.
Since healthcare services are sensitive and specific to patients’ unique needs, quality is an important attribute that determines health outcomes. The use of statistics enables healthcare providers to evaluate and establish if the nature of the care they deliver to patients meets the standards or deviates significantly from them. For instance, the World Health Organization has established standards and guidelines for healthcare providers to follow and ensure they deliver a specific quality of care to different patients. Diagnoses, treatment interventions, and patient outcomes are significant parameters analyzed using statistics to establish health quality (Oster & Enders, 2018). Accurate diagnosis of diseases requires statistics to determine if disease markers are reliable to make informed decisions regarding patients’ conditions. Variations in demographics and the needs of diseases necessitate applying statistics to customize treatment interventions among patients to achieve specific health outcomes. Overall, statistics allow healthcare providers to deliver care that is consistent with the established standards and guidelines.
The risk of medical errors in healthcare organizations requires applying statistics to ensure that diagnoses and treatments are safe. Patients’ diagnoses ought to be accurate to protect them from undue harm stemming from the use of drugs. In essence, the diagnosis should ensure that they provide precise information for the appropriate prescription of drugs. In drug design, statistics enable the determination of therapeutic indices and safety margins for doctors to prescribe the right doses and ensure safety from adverse effects (Oster & Enders, 2018). Furthermore, the statistical analysis aids in evaluating the pharmacodynamic and pharmacokinetic properties of drugs for safety prescriptions to patients. By adhering to drugs’ safety margins, healthcare providers prevent medical errors related to dosage.
For healthcare organizations to undertake health promotion, they have to survey the target population and identify their unique needs. The process of doing a needs assessment requires statistics in the questionnaire design, sampling of individuals, information collection, and data analysis (Guetterman, 2019). Information such as prevalence, distribution, and risks enable epidemiologists to formulate effective interventions for health promotion. For example, the prevalence rates and the distribution of Coronavirus empower the health care systems to make informed decisions regarding preventive measures and guidelines necessary for effective health promotion among the target population.
Leaders play a critical role in healthcare organizations because they determine the nature of policies, guidelines, programs, and interventions to deliver quality care. To keep abreast of advancements in care, leaders read, interpret, and translate novel findings into effective interventions that ensure quality improvement (Guetterman, 2019). Researchers report their results using descriptive and inferential statistics for the target audience to consume and apply in their respective areas of specialization. Leaders’ work is to help their teams understand research findings and use them to advance the delivery of care. Significance, validity, and reliability are vital statistical parameters that leaders examine when interpreting and translating research findings.
As a specialty area, nursing requires statistical knowledge in undertaking research activities to improve the delivery of care to patients. Guetter
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