Course Summary

Intervention research is research undertaken to develop new or improved healthcare interventions and to evaluate the effectiveness of pharmacologic interventions. This is considered to be the most reliable evidence in healthcare research. In a clinical trial setting, the researcher aims to explore whether a medical strategy, a treatment or a device is safe and effective for humans. Clinical trials produce the best data available for healthcare decision making by utilising stringent scientific standards and protocols in the design and development of intervention research.

Learning Outcomes

In this module you will be able to develop tools to evaluate the most current medical research findings, use the skills developed to apply specific research findings to your own setting or patient population by calculating and interpreting the results.

• Understand the crucial issues regarding validity requirements for designing and developing protocols for intervention research as well as deciding on the appropriate outcome measures and their interpretation. This includes the following:
  • Understanding RCT (randomised controlled trials) and other trial design and clinical endpoints,
  • Validity issues: Randomisation, allocation concealment, blinding and completeness of follow-up
  • Clinical trial result interpretation: Risk, Rate, Relative Risk Reduction, Absolute Risk Reduction, NNT and NNH, p-values, Confidence Interval (CI) and power
  • Superiority, Non-inferiority, Equivalence and Bioequivalence studies
  • Adaptive clinical trials

There will be assignments to complete which will assist in competence evaluation.