For Health Science Students

LECTURE NOTES

For Health Science Students

Biostatistics

Getu Degu Fasil Tessema University of Gondar

In collaboration with the Ethiopia Public Health Training Initiative, The Carter Center, the Ethiopia Ministry of Health, and the Ethiopia Ministry of Education

January 2005

Funded under USAID Cooperative Agreement No. 663-A-00-00-0358-00.

Produced in collaboration with the Ethiopia Public Health Training Initiative, The Carter Center, the Ethiopia Ministry of Health, and the Ethiopia Ministry of Education.

Important Guidelines for Printing and Photocopying Limited permission is granted free of charge to print or photocopy all pages of this publication for educational, not-for-profit use by health care workers, students or faculty. All copies must retain all author credits and copyright notices included in the original document. Under no circumstances is it permissible to sell or distribute on a commercial basis, or to claim authorship of, copies of material reproduced from this publication. ?2005 by Getu Degu and Fasil Tessema All rights reserved. Except as expressly provided above, no part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the author or authors.

This material is intended for educational use only by practicing health care workers or students and faculty in a health care field.

Biostatistics

PREFACE

This lecture note is primarily for Health officer and Medical students who need to understand the principles of data collection, presentation, analysis and interpretation. It is also valuable to diploma students of environmental health, nursing and laboratory technology although some of the topics covered are beyond their requirements. The material could also be of paramount importance for an individual who is interested in medical or public health research.

It has been a usual practice for a health science student in Ethiopia to spend much of his/her time in search of reference materials on Biostatistics. Unfortunately, there are no textbooks which could appropriately fulfill the requirements of the Biostatistics course at the undergraduate level for Health officer and Medical students. We firmly believe that this lecture note will fill that gap. The first three chapters cover basic concepts of Statistics focusing on the collection, presentation and summarization of data. Chapter four deals with the basic demographic methods and health service statistics giving greater emphasis to indices relating to the hospital. In chapters five and six elementary probability and sampling methods are presented with practical examples. A relatively comprehensive description of statistical inference on means and proportions is given in chapters seven and eight. The last chapter of this lecture note is about linear correlation and regression.

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Biostatistics General learning objectives followed by introductory sections which are specific to each chapter are placed at the beginning of each chapter. The lecture note also includes many problems for the student, most of them based on real data, the majority with detailed solutions. A few reference materials are also given at the end of the lecture note for further reading.

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Biostatistics

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the Gondar College of Medical Sciences and the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics (Jimma University) for allowing us to use the institutions resources while writing this lecture note. We are highly indebted to the Carter Center with out whose uninterrupted follow up and support this material would have not been written. we wish to thank our students whom we have instructed over the past years for their indirect contribution to the writing of this lecture note.

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