Evidence-Based Medicine Journal Club

Each month the University of Pittsburgh Department of Critical Care Medicine (CCM) convenes a multidisciplinary evidence-based medicine journal club, a mandatory component of CCM training at the University of Pittsburgh. The purpose of journal club is to provide critical appraisals of articles that impact the clinical practice of critical care and to foster the development of skills necessary for the practice of evidence-based medicine. With the guidance of a faculty mentor, fellows in the University of Pittsburgh critical care training programme lead the discussion of an article, which is chosen based on the following criteria:

1. The article must have been published in the past two years and not previously discussed in the journal club.
2. The study must contain no major flaws of methodology.
3. The results of the study, if valid, must impact clinical practice in some way.

After the fellow's presentation, the article is then open for debate with the overall tone of truly trying to understand the implications of the study. A point is always made to answer the question "Based on the results of this study, should we change clinical practice?"

After the debate, the fellow and faculty mentor prepare a written record of the proceedings in the form of an expanded abstract with a three to four paragraph commentary. These proceedings, previously available only to members of the Department, will now be available online in Critical Care. In making these available to the online critical care community, we hope to enrich the consideration of current literature while also providing an evidence-based opinion of whether each study should change clinical practice.