Page 12 - Recommendations-for-biostatisticians-in-managing-and-conducting-medical-research-consultations

In order for a biostatistician to be able to propose a valid research design for a research
proposal, he/she will also require a sound understanding of the subject matter (i.e. the
background epidemiology and pathophysiology of a disease, along with the delivery of
healthcare interventions from the practitioners’ perspective of clinical medicine, global
health, environmental health, etc.) apart from the usual statistical concepts. In the
subsequent section, this e-book/book will then proceed to provide a brief guide for a
biostatistician to provide research consultation by preliminary assessing the scientific
value of the research itself and also how he/she will be able to mobilize the available
statistical resources for providing an optimal research consultation to the research client.

All the skills listed in Table 1 are considered to be the core skills that form the requisite
traits of a competent biostatistician. Research design, statistical analysis and report writing
are some of the common topics that are often requested for consultation by the research
clients. These are mostly taught in bachelor’s degree and master’s degree programs in
medical statistics or biostatistics. For those who did not undertake such degree programs,
it is still possible for them to acquire the necessary skills from various other short courses
in either medical statistics or biostatistics.

However, it must be emphasized that it will not be adequate for a biostatistician
to acquire such skills by merely attending classes and workshops in statistics
because the optimal approach for a biostatistician to acquire all these core skills is
through a concerted effort to continuously apply these skills for providing various
types of research consultation to as many different research designs as possible. In
this way, a biostatistician will then have an opportunity to constantly develop these core
skills and also to expand his/her mastery of all aspects of research design and statistical
methods over the course of his/her professional career.

This is because the core skill set for a competent biostatistician will include an
extensive coverage of skills and it would not be possible for all these skills to be acquired in
just a few days or even months. For instance, the subject of study design itself can have a
very broad scope covering both experimental and non-experimental studies. In fact, in non-
experimental studies alone, there are already so many different types of research designs
such as the development and design of questionnaire, the design of diagnostic research, the
development of disease modelling methods and many others, just to name a few.

Therefore, in order to gain familiarity with all these research designs, it will be
necessary for a biostatistician to spend some time to learn about all these various types of
research designs and also to understand how to apply all these designs in actual examples
of medical research. It is therefore pertinent for a biostatistician to focus on assimilating a
large amount of new knowledge as quickly as possible and at the same time, to also learn
how to apply them in widely differing circumstances by embarking on the design of as
many different types of medical research as possible.