Title: Continuing Education Opportunities In Statistics and Epidemiology at the 2003 Annual Meeting
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Section/SPIG: Epidemiology
Issue Date:
As part of its efforts to support statisticians in public health practice, the Statistics Section is sponsoring three Continuing Education Institutes at the 2003 APHA Annual Meeting in San Francisco.
On Sunday, Nov. 16, Mike Stoto (RAND and Harvard) will offer a half-day course in "Statistical Methods for State and Local Public Health Data." Aimed at public health practitioners, this short course will introduce participants to statistical methods appropriate for state and local public health data and address practical aspects of their use. Topics to be covered are: 1) issues in the development and use of state and local public health data for community health indicators reports, performance measurement, public health report cards; 2) surveillance and outbreak detection for bioterrorism and emerging infections; and 3) privacy and confidentiality in the public release of state and local public health data.
On Saturday, Nov. 15, Andrew Lawson (University of South Carolina) and Richard Hoskins (University of Washington) will offer a full-day institute on "Spatial Epidemiology and Geographical Information Systems" (GIS). The purpose of this Institute is to provide an introduction to the geographical analysis of disease incidence and indicate how to use that information to communicate with policy makers and a community. The first half-day will focus on basic concepts in spatial epidemiology: relative risk, confounders, ecological bias, control diseases, expected rates, standardization and SMRs. The second half-day is designed to introduce participants to the use of a GIS for public health disease surveillance, health status and risk factor assessment.
Back for a third year, Tom Lang will offer an Institute on Sunday, Nov. 16, on "Interpreting and Reporting Public Health and Medical Research." The purpose of this workshop is to help participants to become more informed consumers of the public health and biomedical literature. Several techniques and tools for critically appraising the literature will be presented, including perspectives to reading the literature, checklists for authors and readers, and references to aide readers. The bulk of the workshop is structured around a series of 13 general questions about the purpose, design, conduct, analysis and interpretation of a research study.
These short courses are co-sponsored by the Epidemiology Section and the American Statistical Association. More detail is available on the web at <www.apha.org/meetings/continuing_ed.htm>.