The Journal Club Programme

Aim

To familiarise postgraduate trainees with clinical use of evidence from the medical literature.

Objectives

To prepare trainees to identify, appraise and present in turn published articles relating to patient problems seen in day-to-day clinical practice.

Timetable

Weekly lunch time meetings lasting 1 hour every Monday except on public holidays in the Education Resource Centre.

Learning outcomes

At the end of journal club session, the presenter given a clinical question should be comfortable with:

• Framing clinical questions in an answerable form.
• Conducting a simple search for an electronic bibliographic database to identify relevant articles.
• Critical appraisal of the article for validity, significance of results and clinical applicability.
• Recording the above information in an electronic form using computer software.

Learning and Teaching Methods

• Deciding how to respond to a clinical scenario (small group discussion)
• Understanding the methodological guidelines for critical appraisal (independent learning, one-to-one tutoring and peer tutoring)
• Appraisal of research paper using the methodological guidelines (independent learning, one-to-one-tutoring and peer tutoring)
• Deciding how to respond to the findings of research article (small group discussion)
• In addition to preparation of individual papers, workshops to teach critical literature appraisal are held in the training programme. It contains a resource hand out and provides 6 hours of contact time to learn literature identification and appraisal. (practical workshop)

Reading and Learning Resource

Before the journal club presentation, the presenter receives relevant methodological papers to appraise articles from the medical literature. Computer software is provided in the Education Resource Centre for performing calculations and for making an electronic record of the critically appraised topic.

For the workshop, all participants receive a handout of relevant methodological papers on therapy, diagnosis and systematic review/meta-analysis. The resource handout also contains clinical scenarios for which papers from the medical literature are used to inform clinical decision making.

Contact time

1-2 hours (Independent learning) 1 hour (One-to-one tutoring with a mentor) 1 hour (Peer tutoring, small group discussion and feedback during journal club session)

Schedule of assessment

• Peer-assessment of learning objectives and feedback at the end of journal club session.
• Self-assessment.
• The critical appraisal of articles forms part of trainees' progress record in their personal development file.

This page was last modified on Fri May 07 2010