- Provides evidence-based guidance.
- Includes informative illustrative cases.
- Highlights key points for best practice.
The purpose of this book specifically is to teach surgeons (academic or community), surgical fellows and surgical residents regardless of the surgical specialty, the skills to appraise what they read in the surgical literature.
Surgeons need to be able to understand what they read before applying the conclusions of a surgical article to their practice. As most surgeons do not have the extra training in health research methodology, understanding how the research was done, how to interpret the results and finally deciding to apply them to the patient level is indeed a difficult task. Chapters explain the methodological issues pertaining to the various study designs reported in the surgical literature. Most chapters begin with a clinical scenario with uncertain course of action with which most surgeons are struggling.
Readers are taught how to search the literature for the best evidence that will answer the surgical problem under discussion.
An identified article that seems relevant to the problem you are investigating can be appraised by addressing 3 key questions:
- 1). Is the study I am reading valid?
- 2). What are the results of this study?
- 3). Can I apply these results to my patients?
While the primary goal of
Evidence-Based Surgery is to teach surgeons how to appraise the surgical literature, an added benefit is that the concepts explained here may help research-minded surgeons produce higher quality research.
Table of Contents- History of Evidence-Based Surgery (EBS)
- The Steps of Practicing Evidence-Based Surgery (EBS)
- Developing a Surgical Clinical Research Question: To Find the Answer in Literature Search or in Pursuing Clinical Research
- Finding the Evidence Through Searching the Literature
- Hierarchy of Evidence in Surgical Research
- Evaluating Surgical Interventions
- A Primer on Outcome Measures for Surgical Interventions
- Patient Important Outcome Measures in Surgical Care
- Surrogate Endpoints
- How to asses an Article that Deals with health-Related Quality of Life
- Randomized Controlled Trial Comparing Surgical Interventions
- How to Assess a Pilot Trial in Surgery
- Non-Inferiority Randomized Controlled Trials
- Expertise-Based Randomized Controlled Trials
- The Surgeon’s Guide to Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
- Prospective and Retrospective Cohort Studies
- Case-Control Studies
- Evaluating Case Series in Surgery
- Quality Improvement and Patient Safety in Surgery
- Diagnostic Studies in Surgery
- How to Assess a Prognostic Study
- Decision Analysis and Surgery
- Economic Evaluations in Surgery
- Studies Reporting Harm in Surgery
- Evaluating Surveys and Questionnaires in Surgical Research
- Opinion Pieces in Surgery
- Simple Statistical Tests and P Values
- Confidence Intervals
- Power and Sample Size
- Subgroup Analyses in Surgery
- Introduction to Clinical Practice Guidelines
