NR631 Q-2 PICOT

About PICOT

Hi everyone, in your week 1 TD I like to work with each of you to help develop a very tight and solid PICOT and research question.  Remember that you can't post in this TD until May 3rd, but it will be helpful to think about this early.  I posted some other announcements with some materials to help you with that and I hope you'll take advantage of those.  I'm thinking back to previous courses and where I've had to help students the most and I thought I'd provide some additional direction.

What would help me (and you) the most is if you would format your initial post like this:

1. Brief overview of your project idea

1. You'll all be working from the same Chamberlain Hospital ER case scenario so some of your project ideas may be similar

2. State your PICOT listing each of the elements point by point:

1. P - What is your population of interest (Among _______, .....)(I know that some PICOT conventions allow for P to stand for other things but for our projects it works best to use P to describe the population that will be affected by your intervention)

2. I - Succinctly state your intervention...what are you proposing to do differently than what is currently being done that is a change in practice and that you think will result in achieving your outcome

3. C - State what you are comparing your intervention to.  This might simply be the current state or it may be a specific program or data set.

4. O - What is your desired outcome?  Please state this in very measurable terms.  One example of this would be to state something like "Decrease/increase (some form of direction) falls from X (baseline) to Y (goal)"

5. T - Include a time element.  At what point in time to you expect to have made enough progress toward your goal to do some measurement?

3. Finally transform your PICOT statements into a fluid sentence that states your research question or project proposal.

What I'll be doing with each of you is helping you either narrow your focus or address some part of your PICOT to make it more measurable.  If you work hard now it will help guide the development of your project more smoothly.  I hope this makes week 1 easier for you!  I look forward to starting to review your project ideas!