Critical evaluation: Introduction
NB: See learning outcomes for this tutorial mapped to competencies and a PDF of the whole text.
☞ Why this subject matters...
As a new hospital pharmacist you probably won’t be
undertaking detailed critical evaluation of trials or systemic reviews every
day. However, you will be weighing up evidence from all sorts of different
sources such as the BNF, journals, national guidelines or online discussion
forums to help you to make decisions. You need the best quality evidence to
help you care for individual patients, update your practice, or write a
guideline. So, you must able to assess the validity and usefulness of different
types of data with confidence.
Definition
What do you think we mean by the term critical evaluation (sometimes known as critical appraisal)?
One definition is that it
is a process of carefully and systematically examining research to judge
whether the data are valid and useful.
- We assess validity by considering how robust the data are: is the clinical trial scientifically sound?
- We can evaluate usefulness by thinking about what the results mean for our patients in the real world.
Most of this tutorial is devoted to examining validity and usefulness in more detail.