Evaluating relevance

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• Format Lessons, Texts
• Language/s English
• Target Audience Further education
• EBM Stage 4 - Decision making
• Duration <5 mins
• Difficulty Introductory

Key Concepts addressed

• 2-1a Comparison groups should be similar
• 2-1d People should not know which treatment they get
• 1-1a Treatments can harm
• 3-2a Do the outcomes measured matter to you?
• 2-2a Reviews of fair comparisons should be systematic
• 1-2b Explanations about how treatments work can be wrong
• 1-2e Comparisons are needed to identify treatment effects
• 1-3c Expert opinion is not always right
• 2-3d Fair comparisons with few people or outcome events can be misleading
• 2-3f Confidence intervals should be reported

Details

We feel that evaluating the relevance of a study is the first step in critically reading a paper. This directly relates to whether you can (or should) apply the results of the paper to the care of your patients. One of the first questions you should ask is whether the treatment is feasible. If you can’t do it or refer a patient for it, the treatment is irrelevant to your practice, and you can ignore the paper.

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