The situation is clear. The child has an illness which is very likely to end their life – and soon – in days, not months or years. They may be hooked to a ventilator, drizzled with inotropes, or osmosed. The health care team is talking – once again – about the outcomes and what we […]
Latest articles
Practical Authorship: Starting to Write
I’ve hopefully convinced you in my previous posts that you might like to write, and I may even have given you some ideas about what to write about. This is about how to actually write something. […]
Getting the message across
There’s a rather neat editorial in BMC Medicine that discusses how academics might better write their papers to inform and influence policy makers. I was taken with how much the tone of this, and the excellent mini-series of blogs on presentation skills by @ffolliett, were similar and applied to all sorts of layers of ‘policy’ making. Take […]
More than numbers: demi-regularities
A qualitative version of the StatsMiniBlog Here’s idea that emerges from realist reviews – demi-regularities. This term implies common, frequently reproduced behaviours / patterns that get seen in human activity, and can emerge in the setting of a realist review as theme-type things that are seen across different studies. They are the ‘broad lessons’ and […]
Guest Blog: Do All Roads Lead to Rome?
Back in the mists of time, you may recall we described EBM as the combination of best evidence, clinical expertise and patient values. Which is pretty straightforward. But how to tell you have the best evidence might be a bit tricky – the RAMBo and FAST routes can appraise what you’ve got, but how to tell if […]
Steroids are bad for you. Lifesavingly so.
There are two newish articles on steroids in the Archives – one is a systematic review of adverse drug reactions (ADRs) from short-course use, and one the initial creation of a quality of life tool intended to be used to look at how steroids, particularly dexamathasone, affect the life of those children and young people […]
Realist reviews
There’s a not-so-new kid on the systematic review block that seeks to cogently and comprehensive look at if, why (or why not) an intervention ‘package’ works in practice. They are ‘realist reviews‘ which, in brief, take a slightly different idea to how things work than the standard medical researchers might. The reviews aim to unpick […]
Well I never thought of that …
For no particular reason I can think of I bumped into this RCT of “Intraurethral Lidocaine for Urethral Catheterization in Children: A Randomized Controlled Trial” and thought, initially, “Well that’s a waste of money and effort and quite unreasonably uncomfortable for the poor little things that got un-anesthetised”. (My very first job was on an […]
Guest post: The scary thing about research
You know that question that always comes up after a journal club/critical review of a paper session – “so where do we go from here?” and you also know the standard answer – “more research is needed”. Have you ever thought about why you use that answer? Well, firstly, its what we were taught from […]
StatsMiniBlog: Factor Analysis
It’s another one of those things that you’ll see in a paper, often followed by the word “eigenvalue” and shudder, perhaps externally as well as internally. The’ll be a follow-up of ‘structure’ or the like after that, often fancifully named as different domains. The easiest (!) way to think of how it works is to […]