A pilot study is one of the essential stages in a research project. This paper aims to describe the importance of and steps involved in executing a pilot study by using an example of a descriptive study in primary care. The process of testing the feasibility of the project proposal, recruitment of subjects, research tool and data analysis was reported. We conclude that a pilot study is necessar...

"This article reviews the experience of two pilot projects in Bangladesh that have addressed the question of how [operations] research can be designed to foster its utilization. In a rural field experiment [begun in 1972] in Matlab subdistrict, research has demonstrated that contraceptive services, if carefully designed and properly implemented, can influence demographic dynamics even where so...

One of the key roles of a junior doctor is co-ordinating the care of their patients and communicating with different departments or specialties within the hospital. To do this, junior doctors often spend a lot of time on a daily basis contacting the hospital switchboard in order to locate a required bleep/extension/fax number, or trying to navigate an intranet based directory which can be diffi...

BACKGROUND Community service-learning (CSL) has been proposed as one way to enrich medical and dental students' sense of social responsibility toward people who are marginalized in society. AIM We developed and implemented a new CSL option in the integrated medical/dental curriculum and assessed its educational impact. METHODS Focus groups, individual open-ended interviews, and a survey wer...