Clinical effectiveness and the education of healthcare practitioners

Abstract

This paper reports a project designed to determine the extent to which undergraduate university research programmes prepare healthcare practitioners to use research and facilitate evidence-based practice in clinical areas. Three groups of healthcare professionals participated in a sample of convenience to complete a modified training needs analysis questionnaire developed by Hicks et al. (1996). This enabled exploration of whether there are any differences between professional groups using their knowledge of research in practice. This is a relevant issue, as the available literature indicates that the way in which these groups of staff are introduced to research studies in their undergraduate programmes may be varied. For example, nurses commonly have a broad-brush introduction to research studies, while medical students tend to focus on statistics and epidemiology. Sampling limitations are noted, but the findings indicate that for this small group of respondents, university programmes impact on the extent to which they can use research in practice. Differences in response between professional groups indicate that the nature of the research programme attended by healthcare students may impact upon the extent to which they feel confident about using research in practice. This work has raised questions that could be explored usefully in a larger controlled study in which the research curriculum is examined alongside student learning.