A collection of links to sites and information that Clinical Scientists might find helpful. Click on the coloured phrases to open the link in a new tab. We’ll build this over time.
Please contact us to suggest additional resources or to report a broken link!
Research – critical reading and writing
Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP-UK): free and easy to use tools to support the development of critical appraisal skills. Look at the Challenges and Solutions page to understand their suggested approach and the checklists to support active reading.
Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (CEBM): lots of useful resources including a great introduction to some of the more common types of research study design; essential knowledge for critical appraisal.
Understanding Health Research: easy to read content (great for students) which includes an interactive tool to help research novices make sense of research, and an overview of common types of bias that can affect research results.
Equator-network: resources to enhance the quality and transparency of published health research. Explore the reporting guidelines for different types of study design (CONSORT, PRISMA, STARD etc). Don’t just use these when writing up your results, look at them when planning a study too!
Advanced Practice
e-Learning for Healthcare (e-LfH) is a Health Education England (HEE) Programme providing e-learning to educate and train the health and social care workforce. Among the useful programmes is a an Advanced Clinical Practice toolkit which aims to benchmark this level of practice and its application to specific roles across clinical practice, leadership and management, education and research
Quality improvement and audit
Clinical Scientists are ideally placed to lead quality improvement (QI) but what is QI and how does it relate to clinical audit, research and service transformation? This open-access BMJ article from Backhouse & Ogunlayi gives a really practical update and is well worth reading.
If you’re looking for a deep dive into QI then the Royal College of Physicians have an extensive repository of tools and resources on their website.
Race inequalities in healthcare
These resources were signposted in the Royal College of Physicians panel discussion on Racism in Healthcare (7th July 2020). We should all be part of the solution.
The 2019 Workforce Race Equality Standard (WRES) report highlights that there is a lack of progress in addressing harassment and discrimination in NHS culture. The document contains lots of useful data which allows organisations to compare their performance with others and it encourages improvement by learning and sharing good practice.
The Kings Fund have published their research on Workforce Race Inequalities and Inclusion in NHS Providers. This explores how three NHS provider organisations have tried to address workforce race inequalities and develop positive and inclusive working environments. These are complex issues, but the research shows the importance of making it safer to talk about race‑related issues and the need to support development and career progression for ethnic minority staff.
As part of this research, the accounts of the lived experience of ethnic minority staff have also been transcribed and summarised here. These stories highlight that we have ‘a long way to go’ to achieve race equality in the NHS.
theclinsci.com 