Suppose you are an epidemiologist working at a hospital You

Suppose you are an epidemiologist working at a hospital. You have been requested by the hospital administration to study the effects of administering antibiotics to patients at different time frames (2-hour intervals up to 24 hours) before they have surgery. The surgery involves opening the chest cavity.  The hospital is trying to reduce infections caused by surgery, as well as trying to reduce deaths.  The study is to take place over the next 15 years.  What study design is appropriate?

Solution

In order to introduce a new antibiotic for clinical use, human trials are conducted on a large scale. These trials are very long period tests which include as many number of individuals as possible. According to the question, the pre-surgery anti-biotic efficacy of a novel antibiotic against pulmonary infections during and post-surgery needs to be investigated. In order to accomplish this, an epidemiologist can design following mentioned study:

The epidemiologist should first consult the clinicians/physicians the target population against which the antibiotic is intended to be used. The clinical dose of antibiotic and its potential hazards should also be known, if any. After gathering this information, the epidemiologist can connect with different hospitals and health centres for use of this antibiotic pre-surgery at prescribed dosage and perform anti-biotic tests after surgery. When communicated with different health centres of a geographical area, the epidemiologist can monitor and effects of antibiotic and also gather a huge amount of qualitative and quantitative data. This data can be accumulated and analysed using appropriate bio-statistical tools and the efficacy, protectiveness and side-effects (if any) of the antibiotic can be studied.

Though the study seems time consuming and long, it will generate very useful data of clinical importance.