What's a Critical Appraisal???

Critical appraisal is one step in the process of evidence-based clinical practice. Evidence-based clinical practice is an approach to decision making in which the clinician uses the best evidence available, in consultation with the patient, to decide the option which suits the patient best.

1. To determine what is : the best evidence, we need critical appraisal skills that will help us to understand the methods and results of research and to assess the quality of the research. Most research is not perfect, and critical appraisal is not an exact science it will not give us the right answer. But it can help us to decide whether we think a reported piece of research is good enough to be used in decision making. There are many factors that come into play when making health-care decisions research evidence is just one of them. If research has flaws, it is up to readers to use their critical appraisal skills to decide whether this affects the usefulness of the paper in influencing their decision.
   
2. Pros of critical appraisal in practice : Critical appraisal provides a systematic way of assessing the validity, results and usefulness of published research papers. Together with skills in finding research evidence and changing practice as a result of research, critical appraisal is the route to closing the gap between research and practice1 and as such makes an essential contribution to improving health-care quality. Critical appraisal encourages objective assessment of the usefulness of information critical appraisal skills are applied to published research, but all evidence should be appraised to weigh up its usefulness. Critical appraisal skills are not difficult to develop. Critical appraisal is a common sense approach to reading, and user-friendly tools are available to help anyone develop these skills.
3. Cons of critical appraisal in practice : Critical appraisal can be time-consuming initially, although with time it becomes the automatic way to look at research papers. Critical appraisal does not always provide the reader with the easy answer or the answer one might have hoped for; it may highlight that a favored intervention is in fact ineffective. Critical appraisal can be dispiriting if it highlights a lack of good evidence, it may take determination to persist with an area of interest when access to good research in the area is limited.

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