Category: Evidence based practice
Conducting a literature review: example table of articles found from your search strategy
Once you have found all the articles relevant to the topic, review them and record your findings in a table like the ones below. This will make it easy to pick out the themes and write your discussion, as well as identifying failings in research method making the articles less reliable.
| Study: Craun SW and Bourke ML (2014) The Use of Humor to Cope with Secondary Traumatic Stress. Journal of Child Sexual Abuse 23(7): 840–852.
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| Aim | Type of Methodology
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Themes identified
(eg staff or patients) |
| Finding | Strengths/ Weaknesses of Method
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| Magazine Article: Brown A-L (2015) Laughter is the best medicine: from clown doctor to occupational therapist. Australian Occupational Therapy Journal 62(6): 29–29.
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| Aim | Type of Methodology
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Themes identified
(eg staff or patients) |
| Finding | Strengths/ Weaknesses of Method
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Protected: Conducting a literature review: example introduction (discussion of the topic background)
Protected: Conducting a literature review: example introduction (discussion of the topic background)
Creating a research proposal: Triangulation, WTF
Yes WTF is triangulation. Sounds mathematical and more suited to an airline pilot than an occupational therapist.
In one sense it’s using points in a triangle shape to pinpoint a location more precisely, but the sense we’re concerned about here is the social science sense. Really simply it’s using two or more sources of data to make the results more valid.
Protected: Conducting a literature review: example discussion of the themes identified (incl appraisal of the article quality)
Creating a research proposal: deciding on the sample
The sample is the people you will experiment on in your research to obtain results. In an ideal world the study should examine an unbiased representative mini-chunk of the actual population, so that the results can easily be extrapolated and applied to the real world. To get your sample as close to the real world as possible, you must consider:
- sample size
- who should be in your sample?
- the ethics of all this experimenting on the poor sample people
Client-Centred Care & Ethical Dilemmas
Client-centred care (or patient-centred care or patient preference) is one of the core philosophies underpinning Occupational Therapy. In any modern healthcare practice, it also forms part of the Evidence Based Practice (EBP) equation:
Research + Clinician Expertise + Patient Preference = EBP
How much weight each part of the formula should contribute to the overall treatment ‘answer’ is not clear cut, and when an extreme weighting from one or another element is proposed, it causes ethical dilemmas. Ethical dilemmas cannot be solved alone, but through collaboration with colleagues and professional body standards (such as the RCOT).
I find myself almost never listening to Radio 1 anymore instead tuning in to BBC 6, BBC 2 and even 4… is this a reflection of becoming more interesting or more boring? Or that I need talk radio to keep me awake on the more frequent long car journeys I seem to do now? Either way, in the BBC 4 programme ‘Inside the Ethics Committee’ one episode discusses a woman who wants her leg amputated in order to forego any further knee surgeries. Read more
