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A beginner’s guide to probability
Department of Health Studies; University of York; York, UK
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Uncertainty is both "irreducible"1 and inescapable in health care: no intervention ever leads with complete certainty to a given clinical outcome, no diagnosis is ever completely established, and no prognosis is ever completely accurate. A nurse will never have all of the reliable and valid clinical information needed to make choices with 100% certainty. Because of this uncertainty, nurses know that when we make judgement calls and decisions, we can only think in terms of the balance of probabilities.
Despite recognising the probabilistic nature of judgement and decision making in health care, most nurses (as well as doctors and patients) prefer to discuss chance events using words rather than numbers. For example, if you listen to surgical nurses talking with patients about their chances of passing flatus in the 24 hours after abdominal surgery, you will hear expressions such as, "It is rare that patients will start to pass wind
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