After a brief introduction, this tutorial from The National Information Center on Health Services Research and Health Care Technology (a department of the National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health) describes the range of available health statistics, identifies their sources, and helps you understand how to use information about their structure as you search.
- Summary
- This part explains the purpose and goals of the course. We recommend that you start by reviewing it.
- Part I
- About Health Statistics—reviews the field emphasizing the importance, uses and sources of health statistics.
- Types of Data collection—explains the procedures used to gather health statistics including surveys, administrative records, vital events, and disease registers. It also highlights some examples of important surveys and data collections.
- The health statistics enterprise—provides a roundup of who collects and reports health statistics. Finding health statistics is much easier if you understand the organizations that produce them and make use of their Internet websites. These sites enhance traditional publications and expand the available material.
- Part II
- Finding Health Statistics—shows how to use traditional library and Internet resources to locate and access the material you will need for an inquiry or to support a research project.
- Understanding results—presents a brief guide to evaluating health statistics results and highlights the sources of methodological information needed to make the best use of them. It is intended as a starting point for a critical aspect of using this material.
- Integrated approaches—provides a summary of several strategies discussed earlier and considers how diverse strategies can be merged into a coherent search procedure.
