Critical Appraisal - Therapy RCT course for GPs

This session looks at answering a question posed by a patient about a therapeutic intervention. The session includes a critical appraisal of a randomised control trial.This session was reviewed by Suchita Shah and last updated in February 2015.

By the end of this session you will be able to:

• Demonstrate that you can formulate a question from a patient consultation (step 1: ask a question)
• Apply the ability to find a paper to help you answer the question raised from the consultation (step 2: find the paper)
• Appraise a paper in terms of its applicability and methodology (step 3: appraise the paper)
• Recognise how some of the statistics apply to papers on therapeutic outcomes
• Assess how this information will help you in future consultations (step 4: apply the paper in practice)
• Evaluate any change in practice (step 5: evaluate the outcome)

In this session you will look at a paper that has been generated in primary care on a therapeutic intervention. The paper used in this session investigates the effect of an intervention that is not simply the prescription of one drug to an individual, but also involves the use of another therapeutic technique (delaying the prescription).