Critical Appraisal of a Systematic Review and Narrative Review Related to Computerised Physician Order Entry System

CRITICAL APPRAISAL OF A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW AND NARRATIVE REVIEW RELATED TO COMPUTERISED PHYSICIAN ORDER ENTRY SYSTEM

The author of this paper is a nurse educator working in an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) within the north-west region of England. For the purpose of this paper, the author has chosen a systematic review (SR) and a narrative review (NR) and aims to critically analyse these reviews using the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP) tool. The CASP tool has been developed by the Solutions for Public Health (SPH) (formerly known as Public Health Resources Unit), which is controlled by the National Health Service (NHS) (SPH, 2006). The tool is based on the guidelines formed by a group of clinicians at McMaster University, Canada…show more content…

The author feels that using two different tools would increase the rigour of the appraisal and its relevance to practice. In the forthcoming sections of this essay, the author will attempt critically analyse the two papers using the CASP tool for SRs. Formulation of the research question Formulation of the research question guides the type of data collection for the study and states what the study will ‘hypothesise’ (Polit and Beck, 2010). The CASP tool acknowledges that clearly-focused research question will describe the population studied, the intervention given and the outcomes considered (SPH, 2006). The research question in the SR is clearly formulated. The population of patients studied were general and critically ill hospital patients, the intervention was a SR and outcome to be assessed was about the safety of the CPOE and clinical decision support systems or CDSS (CDSS is a computerised medication prescription system) based on hierarchy of outcome measures (kindly refer to table 2 of SR) within ICU settings. Likewise, in the NR, the population of patients studied were general and critically ill patients, the analysis was done via a NR and the purpose of the study was to assess the results of CPOE on clinical and surrogate outcomes in hospitalised patients in both