Reviewing Education for Health Professionals

Module code: 24244

This is the first module in the PG Diploma in Education for Health Professionals. Its purpose is to enable you to access and assess existing information which is relevant to your educational setting. There is no point in re-inventing the wheel, but there is an overwhelming quantity of published research and many sources of data relevant to education for health professionals. Therefore, in this module, you will gain practical knowledge of how to retrieve relevant literature and data. You will practice searching electronic databases, look at existing questionnaires and access organisation-specific data. You will also learn to use reference management software to organise retrieved literature and for writing papers. You will evaluate the different types of literature review.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the module you should be able to: 

• Iteratively design a research question to address an educational issue within a healthcare setting
• Compare the suitability of different theoretical frameworks to structure examination of the research question
• Formulate appropriate search terms and deployed them within one or more bibliographic databases to retrieve potentially relevant literature 
• Assess then organise the retrieved literature using reference management software
• Utilise data specific to the healthcare setting to estimate the significance of directly relevant and/ or contextual factors
• Critically appraise the relative merits of narrative, structured and systematic reviews with respect to a specified research question and educational healthcare research domain
• Synthesise the above outcomes into a protocol for a systematic review that adheres to published guidelines; this involves describing the rationale, objectives and methods to locate, select, analyse and evaluate studies.

Contact time

30 hours.

Assessment

One 4000 word assignment.