Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery Residency Journal Club

Journal Club, which will occur the first Monday of the month, is a learning activity that residents will engage in to develop the skills needed to use information technology to locate, appraise and assimilate evidence from scientific studies, and apply it to their patients' health problems.

1. Locating information: All residents have access to the Health Science library and 24 hour access to the online HSC library. The library maintains a current print collection of over 170,000 serial and monograph volumes, more than 95,000 books, more than 4,200 electronic books, about 20 print journals, and over 10,000 electronic journals. Additionally, the library supports access to over 290 primarily web-based electronic research databases, including ACCESSMedicine, ClinicalKey, DynaMed, MEDLINE, ScienceDirect, UpToDate, and Web of Science.

2. Using Information technology: Throughout the year, the library offers numerous sessions on improving the effectiveness of managing information resources. These include advance searching techniques and introduction to systematic reviews as well as other sessions.

3. Appraising information: The resident will present the article by first giving the Study Background, followed by the Study Methodology and Results, which includes a description of the study population, including inclusion/exclusion criteria, explanation of the statistical methods, and the Author's Discussion, presenting the authors' conclusions and the resident's perspective on the study results, including explanations of inconsistent or unexpected results.

This will be followed by an Article critique, which will assess the validity of the study, assess for potential sources of bias, including the funding sources and authors' affiliations. The resident will discuss the trade-offs between potential benefits of the study intervention versus potential risks and the cost. If the resident has problems with appraising the information, they will seek the help of the attending who is the assigned discussion leader for that session.

4. Assimilating evidence information: The resident will be expected to restate the authors' take-home message, followed by the resident's interpretation of the study. The resident will provide a personal perspective, detailing why he/she finds this paper interesting or important. Then, the resident will look forward and use this opportunity to "think outside the box." Does the resident envision these study results changing the landscape of clinical practice or redirecting research in this field? If so, how? This discussion will be stimulated by the attending leading Journal Club at that time.

5. Applying information to patient care: At the conclusion of Journal Club, the resident will take our assimilations and discussion from Journal Club and apply it to standardize treatment of a disease process versus applying it to an individual patient.