Tell us about yourself, your nursing experiences, and your background. How do you think epidemiology has influenced your nursing practice at this point in your career?

Read the first three chapters of Fletcher’s text. Visit the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics website at https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/. The information on this site is primarily derived from epidemiological studies and data collections.

Discuss epidemiology as the scientific foundation for clinical medicine and the development of guidelines. Explain some types of data, performance measurements, and possible causes of data variations. Next, share a piece of information or a statistic that you discovered while browsing the National Center for Health Statistics website.