Legal research methodologies in European Union and international law: research notes (part 2)

This is the second part of a series of three 'research note' articles looking at an AHRC funded project on the various research methodologies used by European Union and International Law researchers. The first part was published in the JCER (Volume 3: Issue 2 - 2007) third part will be published in September 2008

Multifactorial day hospital intervention to reduce falls in high risk older people in primary care: a multi-centre randomised controlled trial [ISRCTN46584556]

Falls in older people are a major public health concern in terms of morbidity, mortality and cost. Previous studies suggest that multifactorial interventions can reduce falls, and many geriatric day hospitals are now offering falls intervention programmes. However, no studies have investigated whether these programmes, based in the day hospital are effective, nor whether they can be successfully applied to high-risk older people screened in primary care. The hypothesis is that a multidisciplinary falls assessment and intervention at Day hospitals can reduce the incidence of falls in older people identified within primary care as being at high risk of falling. This will be tested by a pragmatic parallel-group randomised controlled trial in which the participants, identified as at high risk of falling, will be randomised into either the intervention Day hospital arm or to a control (current practice) arm. Those participants preferring not to enter the full randomised study will be offered the opportunity to complete brief diaries only at monthly intervals. This data will be used to validate the screening questionnaire. Three day hospitals (2 Nottingham, 1 Derby) will provide the interventions, and the University of Nottingham's Departments of Primary Care, the Division of Rehabilitation and Ageing Unit, and the Trent Institute for Health Service Research will provide the methodological and statistical expertise. Four hundred subjects will be randomised into the two arms. The primary outcome measure will be the rate of falls over one year. Secondary outcome measures will include the proportion of people experiencing at least one fall, the proportion of people experiencing recurrent falls (>1), injuries, fear of falling, quality of life, institutionalisation rates, and use of health services. Cost-effectiveness analyses will be performed to inform health commissioners about resource allocation issues. The importance of this trial is that the results may be applicable to any UK day hospital setting. SITES: General practices across Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. Day hospitals: Derbyshire Royal Infirmary (Southern Derbyshire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust) Sherwood Day Service (Nottingham City Hospital Trust) Leengate Day Hospital (Queen's Medical Centre Nottingham University Hospital NHS Trust

Correction factors for Shewhart and control charts to achieve desired unconditional ARL

In this paper we derive correction factors for Shewhart control charts that monitor individual observations as well as subgroup averages. In practice, the distribution parameters of the process characteristic of interest are unknown and, therefore, have to be estimated. A well-known performance measure within Statistical Process Monitoring is the expectation of the average run length (ARL), defined as the unconditional ARL. A practitioner may want to design a control chart such that, in the in-control situation, it has a certain expected ARL. However, accurate correction factors that lead to such an unconditional ARL are not yet available. We derive correction factors that guarantee a certain unconditional in-control ARL. We use approximations to derive the factors and show their accuracy and the performance of the control charts – based on the new factors – in out-of-control situations. We also evaluate the variation between the ARLs of the individually estimated control charts