Joanne Woodford

Department of Women's and Children's Health

v.19-v.25

Meddelas senare

7 weeks

The overall goal of the course is to build an advanced understanding of how to design and conduct feasibility (and pilot) studies for complex health care interventions, following the UK Medical Research Council’s Complex Interventions Framework.

After completing the course, the students should be able to:
• Define what a complex healthcare intervention is;
• Define what a feasibility study is;
• Explain the core purposes of feasibility studies;
• Define and identify intervention, methodological, and procedural uncertainties and appropriate feasibility outcomes to address these uncertainties;
• Understand how progression criteria can be used to guide feasibility assessment and progression decision making;
• Design appropriate quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods feasibility studies;
• Assess the strengths and limitations of different feasibility study designs;
• Critically evaluate the role of feasibility studies as a precursor to conducting a full-scale evaluation of a complex healthcare intervention;
• Design a feasibility study following the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) statement extension to pilot and feasibility trials

The course comprises a series of lectures, seminars, and workshops. Seminars will facilitate activity-based learning, such as class discussions, case studies, debates, and peer review to help students apply the knowledge gained during the course to their research. A workshop will provide students with hands on support to apply the knowledge gained in the course to design a feasibility study.

The course will be delivered as a hybrid course. Students located at Uppsala University will be expected to attend in person in Uppsala. Students located outside of Uppsala University can attend online.

Students are expected to prepare well before all teaching sessions and read three core articles before each seminar.
Since collaborative learning is seen as important, attendance at seminar sessions is mandatory, and only one seminar can be missed. Missed seminars will be replaced with writing tasks or alternative replacement tasks. Attendance of the workshop is also mandatory.

Examination paper: Each student will individually write a paper presenting a protocol for a feasibility study following the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) statement extension to pilot and feasibility trials. The paper will be around 6 pages (approximately 3-4000 words) + references. Students send the paper to each other for peer review. Students will present their protocol as a poster (10 minutes) in the final examination seminar, and students in the audience will be expected to ask questions (10 minutes).

See the list of course literature in attached Syllabus.

Joanne Woodford

joanne.woodford@uu.se