Rev Epidemiol Sante
-
Rev Epidemiol Sante · Jan 1981
The role of epidemiology in planning and evaluation. The British approach.
Epidemiological knowledge is essential to provide sound advice on the provision of health services. The role of the community physician in the UK can only be understood with reference to the structure of the National Health Service. ⋯ The need for reliable evaluative research to be done before policy decisions are made is evident from several studies undertaken at St. Thomas' Hospital, London, and to achieve this epidemiologists, planners and administrators must work closely together.
-
Rev Epidemiol Sante · Jan 1981
[Quasi experimental evaluation of public health interventions (author's transl)].
The classic experiment, the randomised controlled trial, is the best known and most revered of evaluation research methods. Randomization in community-based intervention trials, however, is not always possible because of ethical problems arising from with holding the experimental treatment from the control groups or the difficulties in conducting experiments in field settings which do not approach controlled laboratory conditions. ⋯ Selected quasi-experimental designs using time series and comparison groups are described with examples from public health intervention trials where threats to internal validity have been assessed by using different analytic techniques or gathering additional evidence. Quasi-experimental evaluations are most useful when opportunities exist for testing rival hypotheses concerning the internal and external validity, or the findings can be used to complement true experiments.