Determining The Rate Of Cancer Essay

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Assignment 1
Question 1
(i) The profit in calculating the rate of cancer in a cluster depends on the goal and context of the investigation. Usually, the objective is to determine if a workplace-related exposure is increasing cancer risk. However, these investigations are often raised in the context of staff dissatisfaction and media pressure which must not be discounted in the decisions made. The main purpose of calculating and comparing the rate of cancer in the workplace to the community rate would be to determine if the rate is unusually high or not. If the workplace rate is no different to the community rate, the investigation may even be stopped at this stage. Another, practical, motivation behind calculating the rate would be the staff pressure to do so. If this pressure was resisted, the investigator’s rapport with staff may be damaged which may hinder further progression of the investigation.
However, there is some danger in calculating the rates, mainly due to its …show more content…

However, if not doing so would damage my rapport with the employees, I would calculate the rate but be firm about the dangers of over-interpretation. I would then focus on pinpointing any specific workplace and other exposures that may have contributed to a higher rate. However, it is still possible that the cancer cases are unrelated to each other or the workplace (occurred by chance).

(ii) If 30 cases had been identified out of 3000 employees, this would improve the power of the study as there is an increased sample size. However, all the other aforementioned problems with calculating a rate would remain and a higher rate would still not be indicative of a cancer-causing workplace exposure. Therefore, I would still avoid calculating rates in this case.

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