![]() If we consider all the patients on our ward to be the population and there are 20 beds on the ward, then we can start by finding out the diagnosis of one patient if this patient’s diagnosis is not heart disease then we know that the number of patients with heart disease lies between 0 and 19. However, suppose that you wish to know how many people in the general population with a medical diagnosis have either heart disease or another diagnosis, then we cannot simply ask someone to check all their records – there are too many of them to make this practical. In a ward with a limited number of beds we can easily check the patient records or ask the nurse in charge and we will have an answer. For example, if we wished to study the patients on a medical ward, all of whom were admitted with a diagnosis of either heart disease or another diagnosis, and to find out how many of each there were, then this can be used to illustrate confidence. One of the first concepts to understand in inferential statistics is that of confidence, which means the confidence with which we can make an inference about a population based on a sample ( Gardner & Altman 2000).
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