1. Critical Reading Made Easy
Pip Divall
Clinical Librarian Service Manager
University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust
2. Critical Reading Made Easy
Full day training course on Critical Appraisal:
• Session 1: Introduction to Research
Methodologies & Statistics
• Session 2: Practical Appraisal
I’ll be focussing on how we’ve made Practical Appraisal more fun.
Session one covers parachutes, sausages, coloured beads and a card sort game
The second three hour session "Critical Reading Made Easy: Practical Appraisal" in which three different papers are read each time, and participants are free to drop in. The session has evolved into a journal club, with participants able to share ideas on the papers. Journal clubs are run at UHL NHS Trust, but not every area is able to commit the time. This means that people wishing to keep skills current are able to attend repeat sessions and the teaching is able to react to current health "hot topics".
Papers appraised are on topics of interest to clinical and non-clinical staff, and always include a systematic review, randomised controlled trial, and observational study. Participants are introduced to toolkits from CASP UK (www.casp-uk.net) and the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine (www.cebm.net), and taught where to look for the key components of research papers without the need to read a paper in full.
Papers appraised are on topics of interest to clinical and non-clinical staff, and always include a systematic review, randomised controlled trial, and observational study. Participants are introduced to toolkits from CASP UK (www.casp-uk.net) and the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine (www.cebm.net), and taught where to look for the key components of research papers without the need to read a paper in full.
From CEBM.
We deliberately choose articles that we feel are funny, or relate to something that everyone in the room will have some experience of rather than going for straight medical topics. The aim is to understand the principles of research methodology rather than the nitty gritty of the topic. In the morning session we make it clear that users do not need to have an understanding of every issue a paper is examining.
Since 2015, participants report their confidence in reading and appraising scientific research has increased. The average reported increase in confidence after attendance is 32%.
We receive consistently good feedback, and there is a lot of repeat attendance at the afternoon sessions from those who wish to refresh their skills. We are now taking this training out into the workplace where we can afford to be more focussed in the selection of journal articles. We’ve been instrumental in setting up two new journal clubs in the past nine months.