Question
Answered step-by-step
Asked by tpattwork13
Let’s look at a hypothetical example to see how a healthcare provider can use the CI to determine the importance of a study’s findings to her patients.
Sylvia cares for patients undergoing coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery. She is interested in improving her patients’ length of stay (LOS) in the hospital. She searched the literature and found a randomized control trial reporting that intervention X, when compared to the usual care on the nursing unit, was found to shorten LOS. In the results section of the study, the researchers reported a mean stay of 5.5 days, a confidence interval of (2, 18), and a 95% probability. What do these results mean for Sylvia’s practice?
In this example, the mean LOS for the patients was 5.5 days. So, on average, the patient undergoing surgery would be hospitalized for 5.5 days. The CI is reported as a range of values, from 2 to 18 days, which means the LOS for patients undergoing a CABG ranged from as a little as 2 days to a maximum of 18 days. This range represents an estimate of the researchers’ findings and includes the probability of the true LOS in the population of patients undergoing CABG is within that range. The probability reported in this study is 95%. This means that Sylvia can be 95% confident that if she implemented this intervention with her population, the LOS would range between 2 and 18 days.
How confident should Sylvia be that her patients will be hospitalized about 5.5 days (the mean from the study) if she implements this intervention?
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Very confident
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Somewhat confident
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Not very confident
SCIENCE
HEALTH SCIENCE
NURSING
NURSING NURS506