Course description

Course lay-out

The eighth course discusses several topics; these topics are:

• Methods of clinical-scientific research
• Judgment of of clinical-scientific publications
• Clinical decision analysis
• Mathematical background of several medical statistical methods
• Recognise which statistical method has to be used in a particular situation
• Application of medical statistics
• Usage of SPSS

 

Educational goals

At the end of this course the student has acquired knowledge of and insight into:

• methods of clinical-scientific research: the methods and the way of thinking of medical-scientific research in medical science
• judgment of clinical-scientific publications: trained skills in judgment of clinical-scientific publications
• clinical decision analysis: knowledge of the nature of decision problems, methods for determining optimal diagnostic and/or treatment options, skills in analysing and modelling decision processes and the implementation of the results of these analyses in the real world
• mathematical background of several medical statistical methods
• recognise which statistical method has to be used in a particular situation
• application of medical statistics
• usage of SPSS

 

Involved departments

• Clinical Epidemiology & Biostatistics

 

Evaluation

Evaluation of the course and assignments

This course was all about statistics, this is also not one of my favorite topics. Furthermore epidemiology was discussed and we used the software package SPSS a lot. Two assignments had to be completed in this course. First a meta-analysis had to be done and second a review had to be written. In order to complete these assignments it was necessary to use SPSS. Practicals were organised to get familiar with SPSS. At that time I found it difficult to work with SPSS, but nowadays that is not a problem. Writing a review in English was also a good practice. It was allowed to write it in Dutch, but by writing it in English was a good exercise. The assignments did cover a lot of the matter that had to be studied for the examination. As a consequence I had not to learn everything in the last week, so I passed the exam the first time.