Health Care Research

The critiques of two articles reporting on health care research are reported in this report. The first of these articles concerned occupational lead poisoning, while the second articles concerned efforts to curtail the smoking of tobacco. The critique of each article is presented separately, and a brief contrast and comparison of the two articles is made in the concluding section of the report.

The article critiqued in relation to occupational lead poisoning was "Occupational Lead Poisoning in Ohio: Surveillance Using Workers' Compensation Data" (Seligman, Haplerin, Mullan, and Frazier, 1986, pp. 12991302). The article is critiqued within the contexts of problem, purpose, subjects, procedure, findings, and reaction.

Occupational heavy metal poisoning was a serious problem in the United States, and lead, arsenic, and zinc poisoning in the workplace was, at the time this article was published in the mid1980s, expected to be eliminated by 1990 (Seligman, Haplerin, Mullan, and Frazier, 1986, p. 1299). The problem confronting those authorities responsible for occupational health, however, was no surveillance system existed in the mid1980s that would permit an accurate assessment of the extent to which lead poisoning was being controlled in the American workplace (Seligman, Haplerin, Mullan, and Frazier, 1986, p. 1299). Proposals had been made to use workers' compensation claims as a

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sed in making the assessments. Rather, the researchers relied on simple percentages to make their assessment (Seligman, Haplerin, Mullan, and Frazier, 1986, p. 1300). Findings The researchers found that the "likelihood that a company had a case of lead poisoning was strongly correlated with the number of claims against the company" (Seligman, Haplerin, Mullan, and Frazier, 1986, p. 1301). Unfortunately, the researchers based this findings on simple percentages, as no correlation analysis was performed. The researchers found further that the number of workers' compensation cases filed in relation to occupational lead poisoning was not related to OSHA inspections (Seligman, Haplerin, Mullan, and Frazier, 1986, p. 1301). Again, however, no sophisticated statistical analysis was performed to confirm this finding. Reaction The researchers concluded that workers' compensation claims "appear to be a useful adjunct to an occupational lead poisoning surveillance system" (Seligman, Haplerin, Mullan, and Frazier, 1986, p. 1302). In the opinion of this reviewer, however, this conclusion was based on unconfirmed findings, and, thus, both the study findings and the conclusions drawn from these findings should be treated with caution.

Category: Medical - H