MPH5202 - Clinical epidemiology

This unit builds upon existing epidemiology knowledge that students have to apply to clinical practice and research. The unit will require students to write clinical vignettes that describe patients' relevant problems, identify personal information gaps for clinical problems, and locate information to meet these information gaps. Verified methods will be used to frame a clinical question and design a strategy to search the medical literature using summaries, syntheses and study databases to locate the best evidence available to answer a clinical question for treatment, diagnosis, screening, harm and prognosis.

The unit will provide an opportunity for students to critically appraise the validity of clinical practice guidelines, systematic reviews and primary studies published in the medical literature, and apply results to clinical research and patient care. The unit will address criteria for choosing studies including the importance of levels of evidence against a gold standard. In addition, the unit will acknowledge the importance of clinical judgement and decision making within the context of effect size of appraised studies and application to clinical research and patient care.