Questions about the effects of interventions: Examples of appraisals from different health professions

This chapter is an accompaniment to the previous chapter (Chapter 4) in which you learnt how to critically appraise evidence about the effects of interventions. In order to further illustrate the key points from Chapter 4, this chapter contains a number of worked examples of questions about the effects of interventions. As we mentioned in the preface of the book, we believe that it can be easier to learn the process of critical appraisal when you see some worked examples of how it is done, and it is even better when the examples are from your own health profession. Therefore, this chapter (and likewise Chapters 7, 9 and 11) contains examples from a range of health professions. Some of the clinical examples are relevant to more than one health profession. Each example is formatted in a similar manner and contains the following elements;
- a clinical scenario that explains the origins of the clinical question
- the clinical question
- the search terms and databases used to find evidence to answer the clinical question - a brief description of the article chosen and the reason for its selection - a structured abstract of the chosen article 8 an appraisal of the risk of bias of the evidence - a summary of the main results of the article that are relevant to the clinical question - a brief discussion about how the evidence can be used to inform practice.