In: Nursing
wood-chip manufacturing plant. Persons employed in this plant include: tree cutters, truckers, machine operators, packagers, assembly line workers, secretarial staff, management staff, janitorial staff, marketing and publicity staff, accounting staff and miscellaneous staff. Recently, labor leaders of the plant approached you, as an epidemiologist in the public health center, because they are concerned about what they perceive is an increase in respiratory complaints among employees. Design a cohort study to evaluate their concerns. Would you conduct a prospective or a retrospective study? What outcomes might you be interested in evaluating? Explain the strengths of your chosen study design.
Answer :
cohort study : it is a type of analytical study, which is follow to obtain, additional evidence to support existence of association between suspected cause and diseases.
Cohort study includes
* prospective study
* retrospective cohort study
* Ambi directional cohort study.
I will conduct a retrospective study because in retrospective study the individuals that share a common exposure factor is compared with another group of equivalent group of not exposed to that factor, and to determine the factors influences on incidence of a condition such a disease.
Here also different staff people are involving and the labour leader is saying the word is increase in respiratory complaints, it indicates the people are have a risk from previous, so here in retrospective we will see the past complaints of the people.
By conducting retrospective cohort study, we can able see the back wards that means previous history and examine the exposure to suspected risk factors, in relation to an outcome.
The outcomes like develovement of disease, and evaluating the risk factots which will cause disease.
Strengths of retrospective study
* we can occumulate the data for large number of cases or patients.
* multiplie outcomes can measured for any one exposure.
* we can measures incidence and prevalence.
* we can see at multiple exposure.