Statistics – Where is the Source?

I have got many queries on the source of Statistics. “Where to study? What to study? How to study? “

And yes, it’s not a subject we doctors usually adore, but it’s not something we can escape from!

And a couple of questions invariably appear in the exam- written and sometimes in OSCE like the Forest Plot.

The statistics questions are almost same for part 1 & 2.

• I have gathered my knowledge by doing MRCOG Part 1 books. Any  Basic Science Book with a chapter in statistics would do.
• But I did come across a very useful statistics chapter from a MRCP book- Basic Medical Sciences for MRCP PART 1. I made my notes from this book.

• There is also a TOG article on statistics- a bit lengthy though.
• Strat OG also has some statistics titles which you will find useful.
• I also found a useful resource given by Dr. Tom Mcfarlene on statistics. You may want to check it.  Read “Basic Statistics 1 & 11”.  This has power point presentations.

To get the hang of useful topics, please do more and more practice questions.

Make sure you memorise important formulas for the exam, which you may have to use to derive answers from. For example-

1. Sensitivity / Specificity
2. Positive predictive value ( I think we had a question on this for the last exam)/ Negative predictive Value
3. Odds ratio / Risk ratio
4. Mean / Median / Mode
5. Skewing to the right or left of the Bell shaped curve
6. Interquartile range
7. Standard deviation / Variance
8. Standard error
9. Chi-square test /Mann-Whitney U-test / t-test/ Fisher’s Exact test-– know in which scenario, which test is used.
10. Case control study/ Cohort study
11. P –Value
12. Confidence Interval

These are the things I can think of Statistics to help you guys… And and if you find this useful please share the knowledge.

Happy Reading! 🙂