EVIDENCE EVALUATION

Evaluation of the Inter-Professional Evidence Base

Introduction

We developed a poster that aimed providing information about meningitis in children younger than 10 years to parents and carers. Here we will describe the process of developing that poster. Mainly we will focus here in describing the reasons for including or excluding the sources of data and literature. Also we will discuss that how we made our search of electronic data precise and time efficient.

Understanding the Topic

The very first step our group took was to understand the topic and realize its importance ourselves so that we can effectively deliver this realization to the parents, carers and other viewers of the poster. We narrowed the topic after a group discussion to the possible extent. First precision was to limit the topic to risks of meningitis to children only. Second precision was to describe symptoms mainly in the poster.

Selecting the Level of Content

Content to be included in the poster that is, images and text could have many levels from technical or difficult to simple and easy. As the target viewers are parents and carers, who all are not supposed to know the technical terms, we decided to keep the content as simple and easy as possible. The approach we took is to search for highly relevant well conducted studies and then transforming the findings into simpler and easier words. Images to include were also decided to be less violent as some parents cannot take shocking images. Therefore, we had to search for pictures that affect the viewers in a humble way rather than the shocking way.

Boolean Search

We planned to limit the number of searching sites and online libraries that provide the scholarly articles and literature as to apply Boolean searching method to the selected searching sites and online libraries. This method of search includes Boolean operators 'AND' and 'OR' that are used between the key terms to be searched. It works simply like, in order to get articles about meningitis that discussed this disease in regard of children we typed in, “Meningitis AND Children” in the search bar. Also to search the articles that have further refined the obtained searched items by typing “Diagnosis OR Symptoms” in the search bar. We selected Scholar Google and JSTOR to search for scholarly articles and papers.

Search Results

Our effort to make the search precise and relevant did not succeed by choosing Boolean search as the results still included many items that were close to our topic but not exactly what we were looking for. Such findings included studies on some particular type of meningitis and also studies comparing the treatment and diagnosis procedures. We refined our search for symptoms so that the results can be transformed into simple language understandable for parents and carers.

From the final list of literature obtained from the two sources, we had to decide what resources had to be included in the review and what had to be excluded. From the beginning our group focused on following a systematic approach in every step of ...