INTRODUCTION Critical appraisal skills are believed to play a central role in an evidence-based approach to health practice. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness and costs of a critical appraisal skills educational intervention aimed at health care professionals. METHODS This prospective controlled trial randomized 145 self-selected general practitioners, hospital physician...

Critical appraisal methods assist the reader in assessing the validity (closeness to the truth) and the relevance (usefulness in everyday practice) of research findings. The specific techniques of critical appraisal can vary somewhat, depending on the nature of the research question. In this paper, the final in a 6-part series on evidence-based dentistry, frameworks are presented to enable the ...

From the Departments of Family Medicine and Pediatrics, Connecticut Children’s Medical Center, Hartford, and University of Connecticut Health Center, Farmington (H.M.F.); Microbiology Laboratory, Division of Vector-Borne Infectious Diseases, Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention, Fort Collins, CO (B.J.B.J.); Lyme Borreliosis Unit, Health Protection Agency Microbiology Laboratory, Southamp...

Critical appraisal is a skill that nurses require. But how can they develop it?

Despite considerable excitement about the potential of PET/MR imaging for the detection, staging, and functional characterization of cancer, this new technology is evolving significantly more slowly than PET/CT. This slower evolution is due partly to ongoing technologic challenges (e.g., accurate attenuation correction of PET images) but also to the complex logistics of combining a whole-body P...

quality Read the paper carefully and don’t rely on the abstract alone. Around 24%-60% of abstracts in peer reviewed journals have deficiencies. Three common types of inaccuracies are: 1) data inconsistent in abstract and body of the paper, tables, and figures; 2) data or information in the abstract do not appear elsewhere; and 3) conclusions in the abstract not substantiated in the paper itself...

OBJECTIVES The aim of this paper is to critically assess some of the underlying assumptions behind these initiatives and analyze the dominant expressions, forms and mechanisms of integration. METHODS This paper employs a discourse analysis to elicit the notion of integration of information systems and its consequences for electronic patient record systems. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS An alterna...

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