Question

Part 4 Some studies have shown that physical activity has many benefits for mental health. The director of health care planning in a local hospital thinks that if he introduced exercise based therapy for people admitted with depression, this may reduce hospital costs by reducing the likelihood of these patients being re- admitted to the hospital. However, before introducing exercise based therapy for all patients with depression he wanted to explore whether or not it was effective in preventing re- admission. He randomly allocated patients who have been discharged after suffering from depression to two groups; group A received the standard post-depression follow up care plus the opportunity to attend an exercise based programme, group B just received the standard post-depression follow up care. He followed up the patients for a period of 2 years and got the following results. Allocated to exercise Re-admission to Hospital based therapy No Ax

Answer 1

A. The study design used in this case is RCT ( randomised controlled trial ) or case -control study . According to my perspective ,it is an appropriate design to conduct this study as it's done to find the effectiveness of exercise therapy on depression patients .

B. Group A has recieved exercise therapy

Group B has recieved no exercise therapy

No. Of patients who had no readmission in group A is 194

No. Of patients who had readmitted in group A is 68

No. Of patients who had no readmission in group B is 115

No. Of patients who had readmission in group B is 56

Yes there is a huge difference in the readmission status of patients among those who received exercise therapy and those who don't received exercise therapy . Out of 262 group A patient's ,only 68 patients were readmitted while out of 171 group B ,56 patients got readmitted .

C. Strengths of the study are :-

- no bias

- randomisation of sample

- every patient gets equal chances of being selected

- experimental

Weakness of the study are :-

- small sample size

- Non - probability sampling