Statistical hypothesis testing: associating patient characteristics with a prevalent or incident condition-relative risk, odds ratio, and logistic regression.

摘要

Much of the nursing literature investigates prediction of untoward health outcomes based on patient characteristics. As an example in the setting of WOC nursing, a researcher may be interested in factors associated with development of pressure ulcers (PUs) for patients in a surgical intensive care unit (SICU). Prediction and efforts toward prevention of PUs in the SICU remain a major challenge despite existing instruments for measuring PU risk such as the Braden Scale for Predicting Pressure Sore Risk, Norton scale, Waterlow and Gosnell scale. In an attempt to better identify postsurgical patients at increased risk, Slowikowski and Funk sought to incorporate comor-bidities and other patient characteristics not addressed in previously developed instruments. Their work provides an example of statistical association, a broad term for quantitative measurement of the relationship between 2 variables collected on, for example, individual patients.