Western General Hospital Each term, the Western General Hospital accepts a batch of 50 new… 

Western General Hospital

Each term, the Western General Hospital accepts a batch of 50 new student nurses. Their training lasts for several years before they become state registered or state enrolled. The hospital invests a lot of money in nurse training, and it wants to make sure that this is used efficiently. A continuing problem is the number of nurses who fail exams and do not complete their training. One suggestion for reducing this number is to improve recruitment and select only students who are more likely to complete the course. For instance, the hospital might look for relationships between students’ likely performance in nursing exams and their performance in school exams. But nurses come from a variety of backgrounds and start training at different ages, so their performance at school may not be relevant. Other possible factors are age and number of previous jobs. The following table shows some results for last term’s nurses. Grades in exams have been converted to numbers (A = 5, B = 4 and so on), and average marks are given.

The hospital collected data on the number of nurses who did not finish training in the past 10 terms, with the following results.

Questions

1. Having collected this data, how can the hospital present it in a useful format that is clear and easy to understand?

2. Which factors can it use to predict nurses’ grades? What other factors might be relevant?

3. What do you think the hospital should do next?