I know that’s a tricky question, and may make you think of cream pouring on apple crumble, discussions about chemotherapy, or episodes of Octonauts depending on exactly what frame of mind you’re in and background you have. Within a research setting, however, how do we decide when something has been researched so much and folk have […]
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What I learned from Terry Pratchett
I’ve been thinking about this for quite a long time now, and this seems like a good time. I’ve spoken about this any number of times with students in clinic, and with doctors in training. The thing is, as soon as they hear me mention Terry Pratchett, I get the judgement. Or, to be more […]
More than numbers: Reflexivity
What effect do you as a researcher have on your work? Perhaps the nice, neat, medical school answer is ‘we try to minimise how we influence research’. Certainly, quantitative techniques such as randomisation, blinding and objective measurements of results aim to reduce the potential for the researcher to influence the results of a study. However, […]
More to do – Report from the Children and Young People’s Health Outcomes Forum
The UK Government set up an independent group to advise on strategies to improve the health outcomes of children and young people (from before birth to age 25 years) in January 2012. It’s role is to challenge the outcomes seen in England and offer advice on what strategies should concentrate on to improve. A new report has […]
More than numbers: Triangulation
Imagine looking at a problem from different perspectives – perhaps the problem of why there are never any clean coffee cups on the ward.* You might choose to count the coffee cups, monitor their usage, record where they are found at different times of day, or even ask members of staff about why they think […]
Every paediatrician can spot a child with autism?
‘Course everyone can spot a child with autism. It’s there in the MRCPCH textbooks right? Something about a lack of speech and gaze avoidance and repetitive behaviour. That must be pretty amenable to a spot diagnosis. This is me being a little provocative because hopefully very few, if any paediatricians think like this. Hopefully we […]
Shape of services?
With the publication and debate around Shape of Training (a UK-based review of how training the medical workforce will be revised for a new era of health care) there is a fair bit of … conversation … about a number of things. Some of these things include the question about how a ‘medical’ service is […]
More than numbers: Sampling
So, medical school taught us all about the rules of sampling in research – generally more is better, if you want to be more accurate then do a power calculation (although sometimes this may be akin to picking a number out of the air). And we all know that randomisation is good practice too – […]
More than numbers: Ethnography or phenomenology?
What kind of qualitative researcher do you want to be? Going back to the previous blog, maybe you want to work on the research question ‘what is it like to be a teenager with Duchenne muscular dystrophy?’ Now, there are multiple ways to approach this question in qualitative research. Two of these approaches are ethnography […]
P3: Reflection and assessment
Simply finishing a talk does not make you a good presenter. The routine line to someone who’s stopped speaking “Thank you for your presentation, I very much enjoyed it,” is as insightful and honest as “Thank you for holding the line, your call is important to us.” It is trite cliche designed to give the impression […]