Aim
In this assessment you will present a synthesised and critical evaluation of three original research articles in an attempt to answer a clinical question. In doing this you will also need to present and explain your clinical question, describe how you performed an information search, and justify how and why you narrowed your search down to three articles.
Alignment
This assessments aligns with course outcomes 1, 2, 3, and 4
Task
You are permitted, indeed encouraged, to complete this assessment as a follow-up to what you did in Assessment 1. In other words, you can base this assessment around the same clinical question and search strategy. However, you are expected to have refined your PICO question and search as necessary following feedback received in Assessment 1. When this assessment is being marked, it will be marked as a standalone piece, and the marker will not refer back to your submission for Assessment 1.
However, you may base this assessment on a completely different PICO question to that which you used in Assessment 1 if you wish to do so. If you are continuing your topic area from Assessment 1, you need to be wary about your wording to avoid self-plagiarism, i.e. you cannot simply cut and paste wording from Assessment 1 into this assessment.
This assessment task essentially breaks down into three sections
Section 1 Background and Clinical question
This section is essentially your introduction which should provide the reader with sufficient background to understand the clinical significance of your proposed PICO question.
You should ensure that you define and describe any key terms and concepts and provide examples as necessary. You should also be sure to emphasise the real-life clinical need for addressing your question in the context of current allied health care. It should be clear that the question is relevant to current
practice and is not simply a question for the sake of asking a question for a piece of academic assessment (i.e. one for where there is already a well-established answer easily accessible in the literature).
If it helps, you may imagine that you are attempting to answer the question as a clinician in a real-life service delivery scenario, e.g. you may imagine that you are a clinician working in a rural rehabilitation centre, or whatever, if this helps you to build a better-rounded introduction section.
It is up to you whether you present your PICO question first followed by your background that justifies the question, or whether you present your introduction first which then leads to your PICO question. Either way can work well. You do not need to present your PICO question in tabulated form as was required in Assessment 1 – just the written question itself is sufficient.
This section would be expected to be in the region of 200 -300 words.
Section 2 Search strategy
You should include a paragraph describing your search strategy that has informed the following evaluative discussion in Section 3. You should do this concisely by mentioning the databases/sources you have searched to find information, any particular text and index terms you have used and any particular limits you have used on your search (e.g. date range, language of articles etc.). You should then describe the process for reviewing the results of your search in order to come down to your final selection of three. You are expected to present a process whereby you have systematically selected literature that presents as high a level of evidence as possible in relation to your type of question, and not simply selected the first three articles you come across that appear relevant to your question.
To get an idea of how to do this concisely, you may wish to refer to some published systematic reviews to see how they describe their search methodology.
You should conclude this section by identifying the articles that you have selected and will thus form the basis of your critical evaluation. In doing this you are not required to provide full bibliographic information (as you will do this in the reference list). You may do this as you would normally incorporate in-text citations, e.g.
“Following the review process, three articles were identified as being relevant to address the clinical question and as being of relatively high levels of evidence. These articles were Smith (2010), Jones (2011), and Adams (2012).
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