Dear All,
I am providing feed back to the list on the recent EBM sessions I
presented to our medical students in the United Arab Emirates. I had
requested the list to help with a WWW address from where I could
calculate NNT and show it live on screen to the students. Thanks to
Professor Sacket and David Badenoch from UK and Paul Glasziou from
Australia for advising me on the CATNipper demo software which I down
loaded from http://cebm.jr2.ox.ac.uk and showed it on the screen. But it
does the calculation of NNT in two steps. First it calculates the EER
and CER and then the NNT in the next screen. Students found it useful
and we are awaiting for its formal launch.
Dr.Jobson, a GP from East Anglia, UK sent me a simple EXcel chart that
calculates NNT. I am hoping to use it in one of my next sessions.
In yesterday's session for accessing and appraising evidence I used the
following example. The students were given this exercise.
Class exercise:
You are the primary care physician in a health centre and you see quite
a few children with head lice. Though different drugs exist for the
treatment of head lice you wanted to find an evidence based reply for
this clinical problem. How will you go about accessing and appraising
the evidence for the same?
The students performed a live search using Pubmed on WWW under guidance
and came out with relevant articles. Then they were taken to the BMJ web
site to access the paper by Dawes et al. Evidence based case report:
Treatment for head lice BMJ 1999;318:385-86.
The students seems to have got the basics of EBM but the only complaint
was why so much importance to head lice in the UK!!!!
Finally a question to the members.
The students wanted to know when should they look for evidence? Is it
for all cases they will see in their practice and are there any
guidelines to decide on which of the cases/patients they should hunt for
evidence?
Any thoughts on the above will be gratefully received and I will relay
them to our students.
Apologies for the length of this communication.
Badri
Dr.P.Badrinath M.D.,M.Phil.,(Epid) PhD(Cantab)
Assistant Professor and Epidemiologist,
Department of Community Medicine,
UAE University, PO Box 17666, Al Ain,
United Arab Emirates.
Tel: 00 971 3 5039 652 mobile:050 6192082
Fax: 00 971 3 672022.
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