Research Literature
| Appraisal Course Over the past fifteen years, program faculty have given a weekly seminar course in the SPH, in which selected articles published in refereed journals are critiqued for their experimental design and written presentation. In 2001-2002, the curriculum and educational strategy was completely revised and updated to address advances in the area of evidence-based medicine. The name of the course changed from “Journal Club” to “Critical Appraisal of the Medical Literature.” The current course focuses on research methods and their applicability to clinical and public health research. The curriculum is based the Users’ Guide to the Medical Literature (Guyatt and Rennie, eds.). To ensure that the full range of research questions, study populations, topics in primary care research and methodologies are covered during the course of a year, the course leaders select a chapter of the book for participants to read for each session. Under the guidance of the leaders, an individual fellow for each session selects the clinical or public health domain of interest (i.e. therapy, prognosis, diagnosis, health services), an answerable clinical question, locates a journal article that addresses the question and distributes the article one week in advance for review by other students. At the subsequent meeting of the course, the student then leads the discussion, using the format outlined in the text, including validity, results and applicability. The faculty help guide the discussion, and provide “mini-lectures” on methods issues as they arise. In addition to our fellows, students are either physician fellows from other departments or non-physician masters or doctoral-level public health students. Richard Saitz, MD, MPH, trained in teaching evidence-based medicine at McMaster University, and Karen Freund, MD, MPH, co-direct the course. |