Doing Research in Emergency and Acute Care: Making Order Out of Chaos

A practical guide to understanding and navigating the unique challenges faced by physicians and other professionals who wish to undertake research in the ED or other acute care setting.

Focusing on the hyper–acute and acute care environment and fulfilling two closely–related needs:

1) the need for even seasoned researchers to understand the specific logistics and issues of doing research in the ED; and 2) the need to educate clinically active physicians in research methodology.

This new text is not designed to be a complex, encyclopedic resource, but instead a concise, easy–to–read resource designed to convey key need–to–know information within a comprehensive framework. Aimed at the busy brain, either as a sit–down read or as a selectively–read reference guide to fill in knowledge gaps, chapters are short, compartmentalized, and are used strategically throughout the text in order to introduce and frame concepts. This format makes it easy – and even entertaining – for the research novice to integrate and absorb completely new (and typically dry) material.

The textbook addresses aspects of feasibility, efficiency, ethics, statistics, safety, logistics, and collaboration in acute research. Overall, it grants access for the seasoned researcher seeking to learn about acute research to empathically integrate learning points into his or her knowledge base.

As the ED is the primary setting for hyper–acute and acute care, and therefore a prime site for related clinical trial recruitment and interventions, the book presents specific logistical research challenges that researchers from any discipline, including physicians, research nurse coordinators, study monitors, or industry partners, need to understand in order to succeed.

List of contributors

Part 1 Getting Ready: Preparing for your Research Study

Chapter 1 Aspects of Research Specific to Acute Care
Jarrod M. Mosier and Peter Rosen

Chapter 2 Aspects of feasibility in research
Kama Guluma

Chapter 3 How do I formulate a research question?
Michael Wilson

Chapter 4 Evidence–based medicine: Finding the knowledge gap
Eddy Lang and Zubair Bayat

Chapter 5 How to do an efficient literature search
Aleksandr Tichter, Louise Falzon and Peter Wyer

Chapter 6 What do I need to know to get started with animal and basic science research?
George J. Shaw

Chapter 7 The IRB process: How to write up a human studies protocol
Chris Tomaszewski

Chapter 8 Ethics in research: How to collect data ethically
Nas Rafi and Brian Snyder

Chapter 9 Safety in research: How to ensure patient safety
Rob Grover and Vicken Totten

Part 2 Getting it done: Doing your research study

Chapter 10 How to design a study that everyone will believe: bias and confounding
Michael Witting

Chapter 11 How to design a study that everyone will believe: An overview of research studies and picking the right design
Julian Villar, Jennifer Lanning and Robert Rodriguez

Chapter 12 How to design a study that everyone will believe: random selection and allocation of patients to treatment conditions
Katie L. Tataris, Mary Mercer and Prasanthi Govindarajan

Chapter 13 How to design a study that everyone will believe: surveys
Edward Castillo and Gary M. Vilke

Chapter 14 How to design a study that everyone will believe: retrospective reviews
Paul Ishimine and Jonathan Auten

Chapter 15 How to design a study that everyone will believe: pre–hospital studies
Christopher Kahn

Chapter 16 How to design a study that everyone will believe: Ethical concepts for special populations in emergency research
Kimberly Nordstrom

Chapter 17 How to design a study that everyone will believe: industry studies
Alicia Minns and Richard Clark

Chapter 18 How to design a study that everyone will believe: prospective studies

Chapter 19 How to design a study that everyone will believe: effectiveness, safety, and the intention to treat: The differences between effectiveness & efficacy, intention to treat analyses, how to handle missing data
Ashleigh Campillo, Chris Coyne and Juan Luna

Chapter 20 How to design a study that everyone will believe: Emergency department operations and systems
Ted Chan, James Killeen and Adel Al–Marshad

Chapter 21 How to design a study that everyone will believe: The challenges of doing international research
Vicken Y. Totten

Chapter 22 The development of clinical prediction rules
Benton R. Hunter and Christopher R. Carpenter

Chapter 23 Testing the safety and efficacy of devices
Sean–Xavier Neath

Chapter 24 Privacy in research: How to collect data safely and confidentially
Gary Vilke and Edward M. Castillo

Chapter 25 How do I establish a research assistant program?
Judd Hollander

Chapter 26 How to complete a research study well and in a minimum of time: The importance of collaboration
Austin Hopper and Michael Wilson

Part 3 Getting it out there: Analyzing and publishing your study

Chapter 27 Eliminating common misconceptions to enable intelligent use of biostatistics
Gary Gaddis

Chapter 28 Basic statistics: sample size and power
Richard Harrigan and Manish Garg

Chapter 29 Basic statistics: means, p–values, and confidence intervals
Daniel del Portal and Richard Harrigan

Chapter 30 Basic statistics: Assessing the impact of therapeutic interventions with odds–ratios, relative risk, hazard ratios
Edward Castillo and Jesse Brennan

Chapter 31 Basic statistics: Assessing the impact of a diagnostic test; choosing a gold standard, sensitivity, specificity, PPV, NPV, and likelihood ratios
Steve Hayden

Chapter 32 Advanced biostatistics: chi–square, ANOVA, regression and multiple regression
Gary Gaddis

Chapter 33 Can I combine the results of this study with others? An introduction to systematic reviews
Brian Rowe

Chapter 34 How to write a paper for publication
Steve Hayden

Chapter 35 How do I make reviewers happy? The review process
David Karras and Jacob Ufberg

Chapter 36 How to write a grant
Zachery Dezman and Jon Mark Hirshon

Chapter 37 How to make an academic career: Developing a successful career path in research
Deirdre Anglin and Mike Menchine

Glossary

Index