Webinar - Research for Clinicians: Making clinical work your researchDescriptionThis 60-minute webinar was presented by Prof Barbara A. Wilson.
Synopsis of session: Clinicians need to evaluate their work in order to ensure its effectiveness, and they need to be in a position to inform other members of their own and other relevant professions of progress in their work. For every patient or client we see, we should ask ourselves: “Is this patient changing and, if so, is the change due to what we are doing (or have done), or would it have happened anyway?” This workshop discusses ways in which we can make research part of our clinical work. All clinicians plan their treatment sessions and make notes afterward. From this, we can take further measures in planning, measuring, evaluating, and recording our interventions so that we are in effect conducting research. We need to begin with a question, posed in such a way that it can be answered. General questions, such as: “Does medicine work or do drugs work?’ are essentially unanswerable. Instead of asking the question ‘Does rehabilitation work?’ we should ask specific questions such as “Do people learn better when prevented from making mistakes during learning?” With regard to methodology, we consider surveys, observations, and experiments. We look at group designs and single-case experimental designs (different from single case reports), which allow us to tease out the effects of treatment from natural recovery, extra attention, or other non-treatment-related effects. Clinical examples are provided to illustrate good use of surveys, observations, group experiments, and SCEDs.
Target audience: Any health care professional working in adult brain injury rehabilitation plus interested others such as students, family members, and some survivors of brain injury
|