Systematic Reviews in Intervention Research (online)

Systematic reviews play a crucial role in this era of Evidence Based Medicine and clinical guidelines. Systematic reviews use a systematic and transparent approach to identify all relevant articles, appraise the risk of bias, examine sources of variation, and, if appropriate, meta-analyse the results of the primary studies.

This course will offer a mix of lectures and practicals that will help the student to perform all of these steps in practice. In addition, specific challenges to systematic reviews and new developments will be highlighted.

By the end of the course, you should be able to:

• explain the rationale for performing a systematic review
• list the key steps of a systematic review
• formulate a proper review question addressing a therapeutic dilemma
• understand the design of a comprehensive and efficient search strategy to identify relevant RCT’s in electronic bibliographic databases
• explain the main types of bias in a therapeutic study
• assess primary studies (RCT) for their risk of bias and report these findings
• explain the difference between fixed and random effects approach and their assumptions
• perform & interpret the findings of a meta-analysis (fixed & random approach)
• interpret the different measures of heterogeneity
• interpret the results of a meta-regression model
• list and explain the different types of reporting bias
• critically appraise systematic reviews

Our courses are aimed at clinical researchers, nurses, general practitioners, and other health professionals who want to improve their skills in epidemiology, statistics and (clinical) research.

3 weeks, 14 hours per week (online)

Even though you can manage your own time our courses are not intended as individual education. We offer personalized online learning with lots of interaction with peer students, the E-moderator and lecturers. Flexibility from students, a positive attitude towards teachers and peers and the willingness to learn together and help each other is invaluable to our courses. To experience maximum interaction, we advise you to log on several times per week.

Note that the starting dates of courses, interim deadlines, and dates of exams are fixed, but you can choose when and where you want to watch web lectures and work on assignments. The e-moderator of the course will inform you about the beginning of the course and about deadlines during the course.

The average required study workload for the courses of MSc Epidemiology Postgraduate Online is 14 hours per week. You will need this time to study, to keep up with the assignments and course material.

Please note that this course is part of an existing program within the Graduate School of Life Sciences.