"stable practice" is a grammatically correct and commonly used phrase in written English.
It typically refers to a consistent and reliable routine or custom. Example: "The company has a stable practice of conducting weekly team meetings to ensure efficient communication among all employees."
While his admirably transparent and stable practice guarantees a certain methodological sameness from day to day, therefore making any new lead for McCain worth reporting, Zogby's partisan weighting can also raise other questions.
Secondly, it is necessary to understand how stable practice referral and detection rates are, year on year.
Firstly, being a stable practice has no implications regarding the nature of the practice itself; the label just indicates that the practice was consistently contributing data that were regarded as up to standard for the entire study period.
The question arises as to whether the stable practices are representative of the whole practice population.
Incidence rates were slightly higher in the whole cohort than in the stable practices.
Figure 1 illustrates the incidence of first episodes of depression per 1000 patient years in the 170 stable practices.
This anomaly should only affect data from the final months of 2005 and is less likely to be a problem in the stable practices.
Secondly, there was no age or sex difference between the patients in the stable practices and those in the whole cohort, nor any major difference in diagnostic codes.
The top 20 most common diagnostic labels according to patients' first ever diagnosis are listed in web table B. No major differences were apparent between the whole cohort and the stable practices in use of diagnostic labels; for instance, the top 20 labels accounted for 97.3% of all diagnoses in the whole cohort compared with 96.9% in the stable practices.
We thought that although patients can leave individual practices, the stability provided by using the 170 stable practices would allow greater confidence in interpretation of trends within the data.
The percentages for incidence in the whole cohort compared with those in the stable practices are also overstated by a factor of 10: the values should be 0.93% versus 0.78% for men and 1.83% versus 1.58% for women.
