Reviewing the potential for critical appraisal training to cater for professional practice

Critical appraisal training aims to encourage evidence-based decision-making and ultimately improve health outcomes for patients. Such training must arguably be participatory, multi-disciplinary and problem-based if it is to equip health professionals for problem solving within a modern health service. To explore whether critical appraisal training has the potential to achieve its aims we systematically reviewed reports of critical appraisal training. We identified 58 critical appraisal training programmes, identified through two recently published systematic reviews. Of these, only 15 were identified as multi-disciplinary. Similarly, whilst many of the 58 interventions included some level of participation this was often limited in scope. Around a third of the identified training programmes were problem-based. Only a very small number of the 58 interventions might be described as facilitating cross-disciplinary participatory working. These were by no means all problem-based. We recommend that providers of medical training consider how they might encourage the use of problem-based, mixed, participatory training to encourage evidence-based patient-centered care. More research is also needed to understand how mixed and participatory problem-based learning might influence working practice.