Healthcare Active Learning is published in conjunction with the Open Learning Foundation. The first 5 sets of materials were published in 1994. This is the first of the titles to appear in 1995. It is about descriptive statistics, where numbers are used to summarise information about the world. It teaches the reader what they mean and what they can be used for. It will be relevant to any healthcare professional who has to deal with statistics in their work and who has to make sense of them and draw inferences from them. Each pack in the series is a resource for self education and a gateway to improved practice for the busy health care practitioner and student. By expertly combining the skills and knowledge of seasoned health care professionals with those of experienced educators, the series provides unparallelled access to high quality educational opportunities - particularly benefitial to part-time workers, night staff, and those with domestic arrangements which exclude conventional course attendance. Managers and education providers also gain by being able to provide more one-to-one teaching and reduce class sizes. It also allows time savings to be made on course development and planning. The quality of the materials and their effectiveness is ensured by the reputations and experience of the Open Learning Foundation member institutions, each of which is dedicated to creating a framework for effective, flexible learning. (Units at foundation level provde 20 hours study and at advanced level, 35 hours.) Features: * Gives access to educational opportunities otherwise unavailable to many nursing and allied health students * Offers busy students and practitioners a gateway to improved practice * Helps under-resourced education providers meet their targets - by saving staff time on course development and planning, and reducing the size of student groups * High quality content ensured by the authorship from member organisations of the Open Learning Foundation * Combination of health care professionals, and experienced educators, skills and knowledge * This unit addresses a core area for students of nursing and allied health * Materials are grounded in the practicalities of the clinical environment, helping students relate theory to practice * Students can gain academic credits following completion of the unit to count towards further qualifications (or re-registration as required every 3 years for professional nurses)

Table of Contents:
Introduction. Learning Profile. Session One: Measures and Measurement. Session Two: About Statistics. Session Three: Presenting Basic Information. Session Four: Summarising and Simplifying Data. Session Five: Distributions. Session Six: Measures of Dispersion. Session Seven: Correlation. Session Eight: Graphical Presentation. Session Nine: Reviewing Your Work. Learning Review. Further Reading. Glossary