Dr Andrew Booth

This workshop will take participants through the stages of the systematic review process as taught at the School of Health and Related Research (ScHARR )at the University of Sheffield.  Based on both the successful ScHARR short course and on the School’s Masters Teaching Programmes the course will briefly touch on the process of question formulation and literature searching.  It will then focus on the stages of data extraction, quality assessment and quantitative and narrative synthesis before concluding with a brief overview of presentation and writing up.  Essentially a lite-version of the ScHARR three day course, but with examples taken from Health Professions Education rather than therapeutic interventions, this workshop will equip participants for starting on their own review protocol and for identifying their further training needs.

Learning Objectives

By the conclusion of this Workshop participants will be ableto:

• Identify the key stages of the systematic review process
• Define a review question and understand how to develop a review protocol
• Describe methods for identifying sources of evidence for systematic reviews
• Plan a quality assessment of the evidence using standardised quality checklists
• Develop a data extraction form and extract relevant outcomes from reported studies
• Select appropriate methods of evidence synthesis and describe and summarise key results
• Understand potential sources of heterogeneity between included studies
• Be familiar with good practice in reporting of systematicreviews

Workshop 2: An introduction to qualitative evidence synthesis using meta-ethnography - ‘experiencing care’, a worked example

Dr Martina Kelly and Prof Tim Dornan

Background:Qualitative evidence synthesis (QES) is ‘a process of combining evidence from individual qualitative studies to create new understanding by comparing and analysing concepts and findings from different sources of evidence with a focus on the same topic of interest.’1   The family of QES methodologies is suited to medical education research because family members allow for diverse study types and questions, address issues of context, and contribute to theory development.  The aim of this workshop is to introduce medical educationalists to QES approaches. Participants will apply principles of meta-ethnography to synthesize data from several publications and answer the question: ‘what is experiencing care?’

Intended outcome: at the end of this workshop, attenders will be able to

1. Step out of the dominant, positivist mindset of systematic review into the constructionist mindset of QES
2. Outline some QES methodologies
3. Use principles of meta-ethnography to explain what the term ‘synthesis’ means in the context of QES

Who should attend: open to all levels - researchers familiar with quantitative methods toqualitative investigators and critical readers of medical education research.

Workshop structure and processes: Like QES itself, this workshop will be participatory and constructionist.

Following introductions, objectives and workshop overview, facilitators will present key features of QES and participants will discuss them in a large group. Participants will be encouraged to exchange experiences and contrast approaches with more familiar systematic review. Small groups willthen examine qualitative studies on patients’ experiences of care. Each group will examine the ‘trustworthiness’ of a paper and extract study findings as a set of ‘constructs’ at three different levels: what the participants say, what the authors say, and what the ‘review team’ say. Participants will reconvene as a large group to ‘synthesize’ conclusions from their analyses and highlight the affordances and challenges of translating qualitative studies. The workshop will conclude by reviewing take-home messages generated by the workshop and distributing handouts.

Reference

1Noyes J, Popay J, Pearson A, Hannes K, Booth A. Qualitative research and Cochrane reviews (Chp 20)in Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions. Eds: Higgins J, Green S. TheCochrane Collaboration, version 5.1.0, March2011. http://handbook.cochrane.org/chapter_20/20_3_2_3_synthesizing_evidence_from_qualitative_research.htm

Workshop 3:     Introduction to realist reviews.

Dr Geoff Wong

Synthesising evidence on many healthcare and educational interventions is challenging as theyare ‘complex’ –consisting of long implementation chains , multiple components that interactindependently, inter-dependently and/or non-linearly with emergent effects and context dependent outcomes.  One approach to making sense of complex interventions is by using theory.  Realist review identifies and refines theories that explain how and why outcomes occur, under which contexts, for whom and to what extent.  Specifically it seeks to unpack and understand causation using a realist philosophical lens.Briefly, causation is generative - outcomes occur because mechanisms cause them to.  Context influences if a mechanism is triggered and interventions and/or programmes work throughaltering context.

 In this workshop, Geoff will explain what realism and a realist review is, when it might be used and provide attendees with hands on'practice'.

Speaker Biographies

Dr Andrew Booth

Dr Andrew Booth, Reader in Evidence Based Information Practice at the School of Health and Related Research (ScHARR) at the University of Sheffield, has been a systematic review methodologist for over 20 years. During this time he has participated in over 100 systematic review or evidence synthesis projects for such organisations as the Cochrane Collaboration, National Institute for Health Research, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), Social Care Institute for Excellence, the National Assembly of Wales, Department of Health and  the Home Office. With a background in health information management Andrew had previously worked in a variety of roles within the NHS, the Medical Research Council and the King's Fund, London.

 Andrew coordinates evidence synthesis modules on the face-to-face and e-learning versions of the University’s Masters in Public Health and he plays a prominent part in delivery of ScHARR’s three short courses in systematic reviews, qualitative synthesis and rapid reviews. He is a co-convenor for the international Cochrane Qualitative and Implementation Methods Group. Andrew serves on the Editorial Boards of Systematic Reviews, Implementation Science, Health Information & Libraries Journal and Evidence Based Library and Information Practice. Andrew is the lead author of the book Systematic Approaches to a Successful Literature Review (Sage Publications) to appear in its second edition in May 2016.

 Dr Geoff Wong

Dr Wong is Clinical Research Fellow at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford and a part time General Practitioner  in London, United Kingdom. He has significant experience and expertise in realist review. His doctoral thesis in 2009 on the use of the Internet in medical education was a realist review and was supervised by Professors Ray Pawson and Trisha Greenhalgh. 

He has worked on or provided methodological support to over a dozen realist reviews. He regularly speaks on and teaches realist approaches nationally and internationally. He gained his medical degree from the University of Cambridge  and the United Medical and Dental Schools of Guys and St Thomas’ Hospitals, London, UK in 1993. He has worked at University College London and Queen Mary, University of London before his current post. He led on the RAMESES project (www.ramesesproject.org) to develop quality and publication standards and training materials for realist reviews. Currently he is leading the RAMESES II project to develop quality and reporting standards and training materials for realist evaluations.