[JC Series] Episode 1: Feeling the Heat at Journal Club

Today begins our first episode in our Journal Club Series.

 

In this episode, we'll be introducing the concepts of critical appraisal & EBM and discussing how in the world we're supposed to stay up to date in medicine.

It's impossible to keep up wit hall the literature coming out - over 75 articles, 11 systematic reviews/meta analyses PER DAY. 

 

We're here to help

 

How to keep up? It's impossible by yourself. Evidence based medicine (EBM) is a team sport. We use:

• Curator services
• • Pulm/CCM
  • PulmCrit
  • LIFTL
  • Crit Care Reviews
  • The Bottom Line
• Targeted literature searches
• Journal club

 

 

We LOVE JC because:

• It helps us to keep up with the latest data in Pulm/CCM
• Junior clinical staff learn better critical appraisal skills from attendings and senior clinical staff
• We're able to discuss and decide how to incorporate data into clinical practice

 

Critical Appraisal

• Basically trashing an article
• Breaking down key components of data, methods, results, & conclusions
• Deciding what information needs to be incorporated into practice
• A difficult skill that needs to be practiced

 

PICO or Foreground questions (population, intervention, control, outcome). What we'll be focusing on in this series

• Therapy - Does an intervention have a meaningful effect on patient outcomes
• Harm - very similar to therapy - does a particular variable/disease/intervention cause harm in a given patient population
• Diagnosis /differential diagnosis - does a particular piece of subjective/objective data have value in diagnosing or ruling out a condition

 

Stay tuned!