Evidence-based healthcare begins with asking the ‘right’ clinical question then acquiring high-quality clinical research that answers the question. These steps are difficult if there is a lack of understanding of study design features for high-quality research or an inability to navigate the large volume of published articles. Perhaps this is why only half of PEDro searches specify sufficient key elements of a clinical question, only 4% use features that improve the efficiency of searching (e.g. truncation), and 13% contain errors (e.g. Boolean operators). Many health professionals and clinical researchers report trouble identifying high-quality research due to difficulty understanding research methodology.
To address these issues, our 4-part webinar series aims to facilitate evidence-based practice by:
- Developing participants’ knowledge and skills in asking clinical questions and acquiring evidence using PEDro (Webinar #1, Joshua Zadro, complete online in your own time);
- Developing skills in the appraisal of a simple randomised trial, including using the PEDro Scale (Webinar #2, Mark Elkins, complete online in your own time);
- Helping you to understand more complex variations in the design of randomised trials (Webinar #3, Mark Elkins, complete online in your own time); and
- Offering a question and answer session (Webinar #4, Mark Elkins, attend live at 7:00am Sydney time or 4:00pm Sydney time on Tuesday 12 November 2024)
Overall, this series will contribute to health professionals and clinical researchers’ ability to apply strategies to systematically access and assess high-quality clinical research.
The course is convened through the Sydney Health Executive Education unit at The University of Sydney.
