Statistics in the Work Place

Statistics in the Workplace

Statistics make monitoring quality control issues in the Invasive Cardiovascular Laboratory easy to value. In a department that performs highly technical, invasive procedures, statistics keeps track of all inventories. This requires analyzing care given to patients and the equipment that the care is delivered with. Statistics are use to measure patient satisfaction, procedure site infection rates, procedure complication rates, door to balloon times for ST elevation myocardial infarctions (STEMIs), case start times, procedure length times, the use of fluoroscopy, the amount of radiation patients, physicians, and staff are exposed to, the amount of contrast that patients are given during procedures, equipment failure, complication rates, how efficiently specific medications are administered to patients, how to staff the unit, and the cost of inventory.

Descriptive Statistics

Descriptive Statistics present basic quantitative data about larger populations. This type of statistics describes large data sets of observations and is characterized by basic, general information summarizing the specific data collected. An example of the use of descriptive statistics in the cath lab is in the data that is collected to evaluate the techniques of sheath pulling.

A sheath is what is inserted into the artery that allows the physician to pass a wire and a catheter into the body. The sheath can be compared with an intravenous catheter; it is introduced into the arterial bloodstream and remains in place until it is safe to remove after the case.

There are three basic methods used to remove a sheath, each method can carry potential for complications to develop. The sheath can be removed by manual means (the nurse will hold manually, pressure to the arteriotomy site), a closure device can be placed in the artery by the physician, or a mechanical device can be applied to hold pressure to the arteriotomy site (clamp or an air filled bladder secured to hold pressure).

The specific complications related to the sheath insertion range from infection, retroperitoneal bleed, AV (arterial/venous) fistula, vasovagal phenomenon, bleeding, ischemic limb, arterial occlusion, or haematoma. Inpatients are followed through their admission, to assess the arteriotomy site for any of these complications. These complications are tracked, reviewed, and reported numerically so that the physicians and nursing staff are aware that there was a complication. This data is reported to the staff as "complications of sheath removal," not specifically separating out the method of removal or the staff member involved in removing that sheath, identifying the mean population of patients that have any type of complication from the procedure.

Inferential Statistics

Inferential statistics are used to estimate or draw conclusions about characteristics of a population from statistics. In the cath lab inferential statistics uses the data from the complication rate of sheath pulls at Cone Health in North Carolina, and makes a generalization from this database about the complication of arterial sheath pulls in America. An example may be the use of closure devices increase the rate of infections at Cone, therefore, in America.

Four Levels of Measurement

The four