Patient/Population/Problem: what is it that we are investigating? eg. diabetes, people with anxiety, falls.
Intervention: what are we doing for our patient/population/problem? eg. medications, specific therapy techniques, falls prevention strategies.
Comparison: what is usually done for the patient/population/problem? eg. different medication/therapy, or nothing (referred to as "status quo").
Outcome: what are we trying to achieve with the intervention? eg. we don’t know, as this is what we are trying to learn.
Therapy or Intervention: how do we fix or treat the problem?
Diagnosis or Screening: How do we find what the problem is?
Prognosis: How will the patient/s live with the problem?
Aetiology or Causation: what caused the problem?
Prevention: How to we stop the problem from happening (again)?
Randomised Controlled Trials (RCT): a type of trial designed to reduce the impact of bias for both participants and experimenters. The gold standard in research. eg. researchers half these people a real medication and half a sugar pill but didn’t tell them who got what so ensure that the results truly were random.
Cohort Studies: a study where individuals who share characteristics are studied over a long period of time, often years or decades. eg. the researchers followed people with a certain heart condition over years and recorded information about them throughout their lives.
Case-Controlled Studies: a study that compares a group with a certain characteristic to one without it. eg. researchers compared the outcomes from a group of smokers to a group of nonsmokers]
Cross Sectional Studies: a study that looks at data about the population at a specific point in time. eg. how many people in the hospital currently have an infection?
Case Reports or Case Studies: an in-depth study on a particular case. eg. researchers looked at the situation of these three people in the entirety of history that have had this genetic mutation.
| Type of Question | Type of Study |
|---|---|
| Therapy or Intervention | Cohort Study, Cross-Sectional Study |
| Diagnosis or Screening | Cross-Sectional Study |
| Prognosis | Cohort Study, Case Study |
| Aetiology or Causation | Cohort Study, Case Study |
| Prevention | RCT, Cohort Study, Case Study |
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Secondary evidence contains information from multiple different primary evidence sources, which means it has a much higher level of evidence synthesis. What this means is that the authors have taken the time to examine a lot of evidence and to understand what it means, and how it can be used for the general population. eg. systematic reviews, meta-analyses, evidence summaries, and practice guidelines.
Primary evidence includes original research and studies, with a low level of evidence synthesis. When written up, these contain mostly reporting on what occurred/what the outcome was, rather than attempts to understand or explain why, or to generalise the results onto the whole population. eg. trials, studies, case studies, and case reports.
Nursing database.
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