A prospective cohort study Essay

A prospective cohort study was used to conduct this research. I believe that this was the best design possible for this study. "In prospective cohort studies the investigators conceive and design the study, recruit subjects, and collect baseline exposure data on all subjects, before any of the subjects have developed any of the outcomes of interest. The subjects are then followed into the future in order to record the development of any of the outcomes of interest (Wayne, 2016)." Since the study was over eighteen months this is considered "longitude" study. This means the study lasted a long time and this is an advantage because the researchers got to study this for a longer period of time, which could make the results more valid. The population was identified and described effectively. In this study, the researchers wanted to look at a specific population, which were three hundred and twenty-three nursing home residents with advanced dementia. The residents of this study were from twenty-two nursing homes within sixty miles of Boston with at least sixty beds. They had certain criteria that the residents had to meet that consisted of aged sixty and older, and global deterioration scale score of seven. The sample is an adequate size to represent what the data has found. I think that three hundred and twenty-three size population is large enough to effectively prove what the study shows. This study did make an effort to minimize biases. An advantage of prospective cohort studies is reducing the possibility that the results will be biased, by selecting subjects for the comparison group who may be more or less likely to have the outcome of interest (Wayne, 2016). They minimized bias by selecting only the advanced dementia patients in their study. This study used medical record reviews, nurse interviews, and clinical examinations to collect data. Also, healthcare professionals data were obtained by doing telephone interviews. Resident and healthcare professionals were followed for eighteen months or until resident death. This was the best data collection tool for this study. One disadvantage to this type of study would be that it might not be good for rare diseases or diseases with a long latency (Wayne, 2016). This study did use appropriate statistical and analytic methods. Logistic regression was used to conduct at the level of the acute medical event identified characteristics associated with hospital transfer. Descriptive statistics used were frequencies to describe categorical variables and means and standard deviations to describe continuous variables. Hospital transfers were described using data from the entire sample. Reducing unnecessary or burdensome hospital transfer is an important goal for nursing home residents and their families and for reducing healthcare expenditures. For the results, this study found that the majority of nursing home resident hospital transfers were potentially treatable in the nursing home setting and that feeding tubes were the major cause of emergency department visits. They tested a do not hospitalize order and it was the only thing that reduced hospital transfers for an acute illness.