Inside View

I've been away from the forum for a few weeks and for a very good reason! We've just finished writing The Doctor's Guide to Critical Appraisal, third edition. We're also putting the finishing touches to the Critical Appraisal Online Course 2012. The online course will complement the new edition of the book perfectly. It's been hectic but enjoyable! I'm really proud of the new book and online course!

The book will be published in early 2012. The online course is due to go live at the end of December 2011. We're also preparing brand new handouts for the Critical Appraisal One Day Course and Two Day Workshop. By the end of January 2012 we'll have a range of brand new training materials that surpasses anything available elsewhere.

On top of all that, we've also announced a new Critical Appraisal One Day Course in Edinburgh on 21 January 2012. This will be the first course with all the new materials. How exciting is that!

I'll be re-starting the journal club posts on the forum tomorrow. As things are calming down here at Superego Cafe HQ I'll have more time to devote to producing some training materials for the forum!

Today we are launching the Journal Club on the Critical Appraisal Forum!

We will normally be posting one journal article to be discussed every Monday. To get the Journal Club off to a great start, we intend to post 20 articles over the next 4 weeks! We will post a variety of studies in different clinical specialties to help teach various aspects of critical appraisal. To download the article you will need to set up a free account on the Forum (guests will be unable to download the article).

Each article will be accompanied by a few questions. After 3 days, we will post a document with answers to the questions. Again, you will need a Forum account to download the document.

We will also post a PowerPoint file of a sample journal club presentation of that article. The download of this presentation will be restricted to people with an active Critical Appraisal subscription (online, classroom or bespoke course).

After one week the article thread will be moved to an archive board where discussions can continue if desired.

The more people who contribute, the better it will be, so please tell your colleagues! View the Journal Club now!

The amount of jargon that one comes across in medicine is frustrating, especially as some of these words and phrases describe quite simple concepts. The same is true in critical appraisal but we're doing something about it! Our courses are renowned for making even the most difficult concepts easy to understand.

One of the boards on the forum is called 'Links and Things'. We'll be posting messages to define or describe what is meant by words or phrases. As you can imagine, we'll get through hundreds of examples over the next few months. You're welcome to make suggestions for new topics and of course you can reply to any of our posts with your own questions and explanations!

Life is pretty hectic at Superego Cafe. Our critical appraisal teaching resources are more in demand than ever before. We're in the middle of updating our online course. We're working with other organisations to develop new training materials. So why start a forum on the critical appraisal website now!? Running a forum isn't easy. Aside from the usual technological challenges of making sure everything works smoothly, forums bring their own work in terms of engaging with members, moderation, and minimising spam. It's not an easy decision to start a forum.

However, if this isn't the right time to start a forum, there will never be a right time! Forums can have a number of uses, from providing support and information to potential customers through to providing new avenues for learning. You can see from the structure of the boards that we're aiming to help in all areas. There are support boards for all our products and a journal club section for practicing the skills we teach.

The journal club boards are going to be particularly interesting. Starting in October we're going to start an innovative online journal club that is really going to show just how easy it is to appraise clinical papers effectively.

I'll be using this blog to post about what's going on at Superego Cafe HQ as we go through this exciting phase of our development. Hopefully my news and views will make interesting reading!

Until next time, take care!