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What makes evidence-based journal clubs succeed?
  1. Robert S Phillips, MA, BM BCh, MRCPCh,
  2. Paul Glasziou, MBBS PhD
  1. Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine
 Oxford, UK

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    Do you catch up on valuable rest time once a week at your local journal club? Or doze while somebody presents an article that has been allocated to them, without reference to “question,” “search strategy,” or “assessing performance”? While the rest may bring health benefits, it is unlikely to advance the quality of care. Evidence-based journal clubs, however, have documented benefits.1

    Having made most possible “errors,” we’d like to share some tricks and traps that we think make evidence-based journal clubs work or not. We have gathered our information from personal experience, a systematic search of the literature, and stories told by colleagues and members of the evidence-based-healthcare mailing list (see acknowledgements). One of us (PG) runs an evidence-based journal club in general practice; the other (RSP) runs an evidence-based journal club in the paediatric department of a teaching hospital2 and facilitates journal club meetings for pharmacists. While running these disparate events, we, quite separately, stumbled on many of the same tricks and traps, many of which are supported by the findings of a large survey of the factors that predict the life span of (any) journal club.3

    ORGANISING JOURNAL CLUB SESSIONS

    The structure of successful evidence-based journal clubs varies. Commonly, the clubs run in a cycle. Our own medical journal clubs run over the same 2-session cycle (see figure—the cycle may be weekly, but other timeframes are possible). The last 10–15 minutes of the session are spent discussing participants’ real clinical problems and defining the structured clinical questions that would help address these problems. A process of moderated “voting” on the questions selects the most popular ones, and then someone is assigned the literature search as homework. The first 45 minutes of the next session are then spent appraising and applying the papers felt to represent the best answers to …

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