question

Original work, no plagiarism

The purpose of this assignment is to help you clarify the objective of your systematic review and will help you set up the parameters of the clinical question you want to address. For instance, if your topic is diabetes, do you want to focus on children or adults, and what outcome will define whether the interventions are shown to be effective (e.g., increased knowledge of diabetes, adherence to medications, reducing sugary beverages, increasing exercise, etc.)?

The task for this assignment is to develop your objective using the PICO framework. You will develop a single sentence that includes the population (P), intervention (I), comparison (C) (only if appropriate), and outcome (O) (see below). Please try to write this as an objective rather than a question (e.g., “The objective of this review is to identify the most effective strategies to…” versus “What are the most effective strategies to…”.

P – Population (the first step is to identify the population you are interested in, generally characterized by demographics, e.g., older adults)

I – Intervention (are you looking for prevention or treatment strategies?)

C – Comparison (then you want to consider the alternatives. What are the intervention choices? Most often this is usual care.)

O – Outcome (what do you expect the I to accomplish? e.g., reduced falls)

The development of the objective is often iterative and may change after you submit 

this first draft. That is, once you attempt to search the literature, you may find that your objective is too narrow (i.e., you find very little evidence) or too broad (i.e., you find too much evidence and much of the evidence does not apply).