92974 Investigating Health Care Change

Subject level: Postgraduate

Handbook description

This subject situates research within the processes of examining practice change in nursing, midwifery and health care. Methodological processes, such as descriptive and experimental design and action research are used as exemplars of investigating practice change. Practical issues of production of evidence, use of clinically meaningful outcomes and development of strategies to overcome barriers to practice change are explored. Research challenges, including appropriate selection of design, research participants, sample size, data collection, including selection of appropriate measures, data analysis and interpretation of results are studied. Concepts such as validity, reliability and rigour are examined in relation to the methodological approaches explored throughout the subject.

Subject objectives/outcomes

On successful completion of this subject, students should be able to:

1. develop an understanding of various study designs used to determine the effect, effectiveness and/or efficacy of health care interventions, practices or services; including experimental, quasi-experimental and evaluation designs
2. explore processes used to increase control in design including sampling criteria, allocation techniques including randomisation, blinding of allocation and assessment, matching, protocols and research staff training
3. develop an ability to understand practices related to experimental trials specifically: power, equivalence of groups, tracking and intention to treat
4. demonstrate an ability to perform analysis of numerical data sets using descriptive and group comparative techniques
5. demonstrate an ability to prepare and present a series of slides that clearly describe your research aim and methods of data collection and analysis
6. become aware of different methods used to analyse health care practices, processes and systems and promote sequential change, for example, action research and quality improvement
7. appraise ethical issues associated with testing health care practices and trial methods.

Content

• operationalising research questions
• research approaches, including experimental and quasi-experimental designs, evaluation, and methods used to promote sequential change such as action research and quality improvement
• causation and confounding - group allocation, control, placebo, usual care groups, blinding, ethical issues associated with intervention testing
• developing standardised procedures and protocols
• sample selection, recruitment and informed consent
• practicalities of randomisation and multiple sites
• tracking participants, drop-out and loss to follow-up, intention-to-treat analysis
• data collection – types of data and data collection forms
• routinely collected datasets that may be accessed (after gaining ethics approval and permission of the owners) and used for research
• creating and using databases in SPSS
• data entry, checking and coding
• data summary – frequencies and distributions, presenting results in tables and graphs
• hypothesis testing, sample size, power, and confidence intervals
• data analysis with t-test and chi-square test
• Microsoft Office PowerPoint presentation skills.