The WomanStats Project and Database

The WomanStats Project and Database

From the Web site

The WomanStats Project is the most comprehensive compilation of information on the status of women in the world. The Project facilitates understanding the linkage between the situation of women and the security of nation-states. We comb the extant literature and conduct expert interviews to find qualitative and quantitative information on over 310 indicators of women’s status in 174 countries. Our Databaseexpands daily, and access to it is free of charge.

The Project began in 2001, and today includes six principal investigators at five universities, as well as a team of up to twenty graduate and undergraduate data extractors. Please learn more by clicking First Time Users and watching our Video Tutorials. Or visit our Blog, where we discuss what we are finding, view our Maps, or read our Researchreports.

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First Time Users

Welcome to the WomanStats Database, the world’s most comprehensive compilation of information on the status of women.

The best way to acquaint yourself with the database and how to use it is to watch our Video Tutorials for beginners. The first video tutorial explains how to create a free account. The second teaches how to use the codebook and retrieve data from the View screen. The third covers reports, downloads, and maps. The fourth introduces you to other aspects of our web presence, such as our blog and social media.

New Database Reveals Thousands of Hospital Violation Reports New Database Reveals Thousands of Hospital Violation Reports

Hospital (Photo credit: Ralf Heß)

 

From the March 20, 2013 State Line article

 

Hospitals make mistakes, sometimes deadly mistakes.  A patient may get the wrong medication or even undergo surgery intended for another person.  When errors like these are reported, state and federal officials inspect the hospital in question and file a detailed report.

Now, for the first time, this vital information on the quality and safety of the nation’s hospitals has been made available to the public online.

A new website, www.hospitalinspections.org, includes detailed reports of hospital violations dating back to January 2011, searchable by city, state, name of the hospital and key word.  Previously, these reports were filed with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS), and released only through a Freedom of Information Act request, an arduous, time-consuming process.  Even then, the reports were provided in paper format only, making them cumbersome to analyze.

Release of this critical electronic information by CMS is the result of years of advocacy by the Association of Health Care Journalists, with funding from the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation.  The new database makes full inspection reports for acute care hospitals and rural critical access hospitals instantly available to journalists and consumers interested in the quality of their local hospitals.

The database also reveals national trends in hospital errors. For example, key word searches yield the incidence of certain violations across all hospitals.  A search on the word “abuse,” for example, yields 862 violations at 204 hospitals since 2011. …

 

Related articles

• Series on N.C. hospitals wins national award (charlotteobserver.com)
• Medical execs dispute hospital study (krqe.com)
• Govt. To Publish Data On What Drug & Device Makers Pay To Individual Doctors & Hospitals (consumerist.com)
• Time Magazine Study Reveals Hospitals Hiking up Medical Bills (counselheal.com)

 

The psychiatric profile of the U.S. patient population across age groups

From the article at the May 2012 issue of Open Journal of Epidemiology

[Abstract]     Introduction: As the U.S. population undergoes continuous shifts the population’s health profile changes dynamically resulting in more or less expression of certain psychiatric disorders and utilization of health-care resources. In this paper, we analyze national data on the psychiatric morbidity of American patients and their summated cost in different age groups. Methods: The latest data (2009) on the number of hospital discharges and national bill (hospital charges) linked with psychiatric disorders were extracted from the Nationwide Inpatient Sample (NIS). Results: National data shows that mood disorders are the largest diagnostic category in terms of percentage of psychiatri-crelated discharges in the 1 – 17 years age group. The proportion decreases gradually as age progresses while delirium, dementia, amnestic and other cognitive disorders increase exponentially after 65 years of age. Schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders as well as alcohol and substance-related disorders peak in the working age groups (18 – 64 years). From an economic point of view, mood disorders in the 18 – 44 age group has the highest national bill ($5.477 billion) followed by schizophrenic and other psychotic disorders in the same age group ($4.337 billion) and mood disorders in the 45 – 64 age group ($4.310 billion). On the third place come schizophrenic and other psychotic disorders in the 45 – 64 age group ($3.931 billion). Conclusion: This paper illustrates the high cost of psychiatric care in the U.S., especially the large fraction of healthcare money spent on working-age patients suffering from mood disorders. This underlines psychiatric cost-efficiency as a vital topic in the current healthcare debate.

Related article

• Major Depressive Episode among Full-Time College Students and Other Young Adults, Aged 18 to 22 (US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration, May 2012)

Death rate measure used to judge hospital quality may be misleading

From the 3 January 2012 press release

Hospitals, health insurers and patients often rely on patient death rates in hospitals to compare hospital quality. Now a new study by researchers at Yale School of Medicine questions the accuracy of that widely used approach and supports measuring patient deaths over a period of 30 days from admission even after they have left the hospital….

…The study compared two widely used approaches to assessing hospital quality. One approach uses mortality rates of patients who die during their initial hospitalization, and the other uses rates of patients who die within 30 days, whether or not they have been discharged.

Drye and colleagues focused on mortality rates for patients with heart attack, heart failure, and pneumonia. For these conditions, one-third to one-half of deaths within 30 days occur after the patient leaves the hospital, but this proportion often varies by hospital.

“We were concerned that only counting deaths during the initial hospitalization can be misleading,” said Drye. “Because some hospitals keep their patients for less time than others due to patient transfers to other facilities or because they send patients home more quickly.”

Drye and her colleagues found that quality at many U.S. hospitals looked quite different using the two different accounting methods.

The team also found that measures looking only at deaths in the hospital favor hospitals that keep their patients for a shorter length of time.

“To assess current and future patient management strategies,” said Drye. “We should assess all patients for a standard time period, such as 30 days.”…

Citation: Annals of Internal Medicine 156:19-26. (January 3, 2012)

Read entire press release

Related articles

• Judging Hospital Quality Via Death Rate May Be Misleading (medicalnewstoday.com)
• Death rate measure used to judge hospital quality may be misleading (eurekalert.org)
• Death rate measure used to judge hospital quality may be misleading (medicalxpress.com)
• Measuring In-Hospital Mortality Favors Hospitals with Short Stays (forbes.com)

Health Publications From The CDC

Reblogged from Chronic Pain Management:

• 

We all hear of The Center For Disease Control when something is going wrong but there is more for us to take advantage of with them.  Visit their site and take a look at the information there.

Health, United States, is an annual report on trends in health statistics.

CDC.gov is CDC's, (Center for Disease Control)  primary online communication channel.

Read more… 34 more words

  Health United States is an annual report on trends in health statistics. Health, United States presents national trends in health statistics on suchtopics  [PDF - 10.5 MB] as birth and death rates, infant mortality, life expectancy, morbidity and health status, risk factors, use of ambulatory and inpatient care, health personnel and facilities, financing of health care, health insurance and managed care, and other health topics. Need help getting started on how to get information in this report? Click here. FAQs about this report may be found here.    From the Web Page

Health, United States is an annual report on trends in health statistics.

2010 Edition [PDF - 10.5 MB]

• What's New!
• Complete Report 
• At a Glance Table 
• Highlights 

• Chartbook 
• Trend Tables 
• Appendixes 
• Index 

2010 In Brief Edition

• In Brief is a new product highlighting selected indicators.  [PDF - 1.8 MB]

2010 Special Feature

• Death and Dying  [PDF - 10.5 MB]

Health, United States data on selected topics:

• American Indian or Alaska Native Population
• Asian or Pacific Islander Population
• Black or African American Population
• Child and Adolescent Health
• Disability
• Diseases and Conditions
• Education
• Health Expenditures
• Health Insurance
• Health Risk Factors
• Hispanic or Latino Population
• Infectious Disease

• Injury
• Men's Health
• Mental Health
• Metro and Nonmetropolitan Areas
• Older Population
• Poverty
• Preventive Care
• Special Feature: Death and Dying
• State Data
• White Population
• Women's Health
• Working-age Adults

Health, United States, 2010 Charts and Tables

• 41 Figures as PowerPoint slides  [PPT - 2.6 MB]
• 41 Chartbook Data Tables in Excel format
• 148 Trend Tables in Excel and PDF format (including additional data years and standard errors)
• Updated trend tables are available

 

Related articles

• Publications and Information (painisgone.wordpress.com)
• Top health stories of 2011 (cnn.com)

Visualizing the World’s Food Consumption – A Map

Visualizing the World’s Food Consumption – A Map

Includes graph on calories consumed by 20 highest and 20 lowest countries (compared to RDA).

Another graph portrays 20 highest consuming countries and 20 lowest consuming countries (by average percentage of income spent on food)

 

 

Related articles

• Graph Words: A Free Visual Thesaurus of the English Language (infosthetics.com)

The State of America’s Children – 2011 Report

 

From the Children Defense Fund Web site

CDF’s new report The State of America’s Children 2011 finds children have fallen further behind in many of the leading indicators over the past year as the country slowly climbs out of the recession. This is a comprehensive compilation and analysis of the most recent and reliable national and state-by-state data on population, poverty, family structure, family income, health, nutrition, early childhood development, education, child welfare, juvenile justice, and gun violence. The report provides key child data showing alarming numbers of children at risk: children are the poorest age group with 15.5 million children—one in every five children in America—living in poverty, and more than 60 percent of fourth, eighth and 12th grade public school students are reading or doing math below grade level.

View this year’s interactive report or download the document.

Related articles

• Race and Child Welfare (fosterwee.wordpress.com)
• Op-Ed Columnist: The Decade of Lost Children (nytimes.com)
• Dire State of of America’s Children – by Stephen Lendman (jhaines6.wordpress.com)
• Report: Recession Catastrophic for Children (theroot.com)
• Many child deaths ‘preventable’ (cutie79.wordpress.com)

Some New Health Related US Demographic Resources

Image via Wikipedia

From a 9 August 2011 Health Information Literacy – For Health and Well Being blog item

First Results from the 2010 Census
http://www.prb.org/pdf11/reports-on-america-2010-census.pdf
Initial report from the 2010 Census identifying population change in rural and metro areas. Includes statistics on the increased diversity and ethnicity in the U.S.

Geography of Need: Identifying Human Service Needs in Rural America
http://www.rupri.org/Forms/HeflinMiller_GeogNeed_June2011.pdf
Uses American Community Survey five year average county-level data to compare the type and degree of human service needs in metropolitan versus non-metropolitan counties.

State of the States
http://frac.org/map/
State profiles of these Federal Food Programs: Demographics, Poverty and Food Insecurity; Federal Nutrition Programs; and State Economic Security Policies.
[Rural Assistance Center Human Services Update]

 

 

Related articles

• 2010 Census Data on PolicyMap (policymap.com)
• More ACS All the Time (policymap.com)
• Why Are Demographics Important When Choosing a Place to Start a Business? (thinkup.waldenu.edu)

Misleading Statistical Information in Ads: A Drug Ad Analyzed and Related Evaluation Resources

http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2011/06/29/an-epidemic-of-bad-infographics-depression/

Do some statistically laden advertisements and Web sites seem misleading? Is there a disconnect between the displayed data in some ads with your gut feelings?  But you just cannot put your finger on why you feel distrustful?

Just plain sloppily represented infographics could be creating some of the confusion. Infographic combines an interesting graphical element with hard data. They are commonly seen in the media, including USA Today.

John Grohol, founder and editor-in-chief of Psych Central, deftly illustrates how to analyze a medical advertisement for misleading information (and downright errors!) in a recent blog item.

Here are some excerpts from An Epidemic of Bad Infograhics: Depression

In an effort to keep trying to get people’s attention in an increasingly attention-deficit world, we get a lot of inquiries for links to websites promoting education programs and other affiliate websites. The latest effort is focused around “infographics,” those graphics made popular by the USA Todaynewspaper that combines an interesting graphical element with hard data. A well done infographic ostensibly makes data more engaging. A fantastic infographic puts data into proper perspective and gives it valuable context.

What these marketing firms send me, however, are not fantastic or even well-done. So in the interests of demonstrating that any infographic can be worse than no infographic, I’m going to critique one of the latest ones to have come across my desk. It’s about depression, one of the most common and serious mental disorders….

….

What about your level of depression? Well, according to the infographic — but not the research or mental health professionals — you can have different “depression levels” ranging from “Normal” (what’s a “Normal” depression?) to “Situational” or even “Major.”

Of course, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the DSM-IV) doesn’t divide major depression in this manner. Instead, it specifies that major depression can be Mild, Moderate, Severe without Psychotic Features, Severe with Psychotic Features, In Partial Remission, In Full Remission, or Chronic.

I assume “Situational” refers to a completely different mental disorder — Adjustment Disorder with Depressed Mood. The person designing this graphic was obviously not too familiar with the actual information he was asked to illustrate……

Related Health Information Evaluation Resources

• Evaluating Health Information on the Internet summarizes tips and pointers
• Consumer’s Guide to Taking Charge of Health Information has 10 tips, including how to interpret risk statements, a “reliability chart”,  and where to get more information. Bonus feature: snappy cartoons!
• Evaluating Health Information on the Internet  by the US National Cancer Institute summarizes 10 key points. Links to related federal agencies
• Evaluating Health Information: MedlinePlus provides trusted links to overviews, specific conditions (as cancer and complementary medicine), organizations, and more
• Quackwatch is physician published guide to health fraud including 23 hot topics (as immunization,autism, homeopathy, chiropractic). While the site is a bit controversial, it does have useful information and links.
• National Council Against Health Fraud is a private nonprofit, voluntary health agency that focuses upon health misinformation, fraud, and quackery as public health problems
• patientInform is a collaborative effort of health care related professionals who interpret research articles, in the form of summaries or news items.

• What to look for when reading medical research outlines the different types  of scientific studies and which ones are the best
• Participating organizations  provides links to news items from over 25 publishers and organizations. “The publishers allow readers following links from patientINFORM material on the health organizations’ sites to access the full text of these articles without a subscription, and they provide patients and caregivers with free or reduced-fee access to other articles in participating journals.”

Related Statistics Resources

• Guide to Biostatistics (MedPage Today) is a bit technical, but a good introduction to biostatistical terms used in medical research 
  

Related articles

• Misleading Statistical Information in Ads: A Drug Ad Analyzed and Related Evaluation Resources (jflahiff.wordpress.com)
• Misleading information on health social sites (and tips on how to evaluate health/medical information) (jflahiff.wordpress.com)
• Women And Prescription Drugs: One In Four Takes Mental Health Meds (worldwright.wordpress.com)
• 1 in 5 of U.S. adults on behavioral meds (worldwright.wordpress.com)
• Ethical Implications of the Use of Data and Statistics (lynnmunoz.wordpress.com)
• Information Designers (fusionfinds.wordpress.com)
• 1 in 5 Adults on Behavioral Meds (abcnews.go.com)